Programmer Humor

Remember what I said about the vim out of the box experience and configuration nightmare? Yep that's why.

If you want to stick with (n)vim over helix head over here, which is going to take away like 90% of the pain. You'll still need to go "yep I want this and this and this" but it's much more like browsing through the VSCode store and hitting "install". Quick start guide, general IDE, Java IDE should do it. There's actually more end-user type documentation for spacevim as compared to vim (which is a giant heap of hysterical raisins noone writes beginner intros for) or helix (which is too young to have actually good docs). Both are more opinionated than plain vim+whatever plugins but at least as far as I'm concerned I don't care which of the fifty available fuzzy file finder plugins I'm using: I just want one that works. Spacevim makes a default choice for you, helix has one built-in. Same goes for LSP integration.

Also you don't necessarily need to dive in at the deep end. As said most of the difference vs. your usual IDE isn't in feature set but how you interact with the thing, editing markdown should suffice to get a good idea, with or without LSP support in the case of markdown it's really optional, I think it's mostly about helping you to not have broken links.