In the docs it shows the minimal configuration to get AstroNvim running which is <10 lines in your ~/.config/init.lua file and then anything else you can just drop in that same file if you want. (https://github.com/AstroNvim/AstroNvim?tab=readme-ov-file#mi...)

Here is a user on GitHub that has a single file AstroNvim configuration: https://github.com/20k-ultra/dotfiles/blob/master/nvim/init....

Next we really wanted to focus on providing a more stable base. NvChad at the time was not following any sort of version releases and had breaking changes all the time. This lead users to updating their editor and things just randomly breaking. We wanted to set up AstroNvim to follow more rigorous software development practices to help decrease this friction for the user. With our updater you can say that you only want to update within a major version release and then you don't have to worry about fixing breaking changes until you have the time to do so.

Along with this providing a stable base was the battle of managing the distribution of plugins that do not follow any set rules. This led us to our current approach to plugin management in AstroNvim. If you are using the stable release channel of AstroNvim we actually pin all of our core plugins to either a known working git commit or to their current major release version if they follow semantic versioning. This makes sure that updating plugins on the user side won't randomly break core AstroNvim functionality. Naturally this doesn't apply to plugins that the user manages themselves, but at least gets us to as "stable" as we can get it.

The main drive behind all of this is a lot of people use these types of tools to drive their work life. The goal I try to keep in mind is I want to minimize the number of work days people use to their text editor all of a sudden not working for some unknown reason.

Some other key differences:

NvChad also sets up a lot less than AstroNvim under the hood when it comes to language servers/etc. so this does lend to a faster startup time in NvChad than AstroNvim, but better out of the box experience (imo) in AstroNvim for an extremely small start up time cost. So if you want something that truly provides a very good base and do all the other heavy lifting of configuration yourself, NvChad is a really great option!

https://github.com/stevearc/aerial.nvim

The biggest goal of this latest major release was to decrease abstraction from our configuration schema. Rather than implementing our own ways of configuring plugins, we expose it to the user in the same way that they would configure it themselves. That way users don't have to relearn Neovim configuration.

Another cool project that we have been spinning up along side this new release is AstroCommunity! (https://github.com/AstroNvim/astrocommunity) This repository aims to empower the community to get more involved with the project and to share their own configurations of plugins that we might not want to ship with the base installation of AstroNvim. This ranges from single plugins such as colorschemes, all the way up to full language packs that setup language specific plugins/language servers/debuggers.

https://github.com/balenalabs/balena-dash

https://sound.balenalabs.io/

https://github.com/willswire/balenaPrint

It was also fun to make a groff template to output a file you can open with man too lol

https://mehalter.com