My new design direction for neovim is "you just sat down in a homie's spaceship and have no idea what any of the buttons do" -- you can see how I did it here with tabby.nvim: https://github.com/Garoth/Configs/blob/da354cd98241dc7582718a9082226fab99403e4a/nvim/init.vim#L752
I'm an oldschool vim guy, so a lot of my plugin tastes lean towards the ancient. Telescope?? Nah I had that figured out with fzf.vim many years ago, and it's stupid fast. Harpoon? Nah, I have marks, permanent undo and location memory, alternate files, fast search. Plus I love using fzf in my terminal so it all blends together so well. I still use vim-plug, it's pretty much perfect, and have no interest in lazy or whatever the new flavor-of-the-year package manager is
Neovide continues to be what I believe is the future of neovim. The performance is best in class, probably theoretically better than even terminals can achieve (since rendering can be done much more selectively, understanding vim concepts like floating windows and such, which have compositing in neovide). The idea of "progressive improvements" in a GUI rather than trying to make something totally different is a great call. In the future, they are likely to implement a new age of image rendering too, which would be aware of z-index layering (so you could have a floating window on top of an image -- current image-in-terminal approaches just put the image on top)
Airline -- well, this is in the category of "if it aint broke dont fix" -- Airline has been in development for like 11 years and has 2700+ commits, 17k+ stars on github. I mean, this is a ridiculous history, that's more work than most projects on github, just for a statusline. I don't tend to chase trends or replace vim code with lua - who cares - vimscript is stable and reliable
Shoutout to the Maple Mono font -- with a lot of amazing ligatures that I didn't have before, super cozy. Demo recorded on an 7 year old samsung chromebook running Wayland/Pipewire Arch with a dualcore cpu, 4gb of ram, 14nm intel integrated graphics, and a 32gb harddrive. Linux is so cool, being able to do that. The ending was... not on purpose lmao