There's a difference between having a "learning curve" and having to spend effort setting up things that work out of the box in another editor.
Vim advocates generally claim that investing time learning the Vim keybindings pays off as saved time during later work. But that's not what's happening here. If LSP just works in Helix, and requires fiddling with config files in Neovim, then Neovim is wasting my time, not teaching me something that will be valuable later on.
Yeah, learning curve may not be the best way to phrase it. But I think that is the price of flexibility to be able to create an editor in which you don’t have to use LSP if you don’t want to.
Personally, I think keeping Neovim the editor separate from something like nvim-lspconfig is pretty nice right now, to be able to update them separately, which is nice for new languages and language server changes. Maybe it (and the broader LSP ecosystem) will eventually be mature enough to be included by default.
I’d also say that if you want zero config, just using a config framework (there are a few), gets you most of the way there, whilst retaining more of the flexibility but that’s not a strong point in favour of Neovim.
Still, until Helix gets a comparable community and some features over a properly configured neovim, I think it will be hard to displace it (and Vim, EMacs etc.) because Helix doesn’t currently doesn’t as anything significant for existing users.
Any sufficiently complex "one-time setup cost" quickly becomes an ongoing maintenance quagmire. And I say that as a full-time neovim user for the past seven years.
Neovim is still my favorite vi, but I think I erred when I started bolting on so many plugins and supporting processes... when I want a lightweight IDE, I'll use VS Code.
> One time setup cost is a small factor in choosing an editor.
Perhaps for you, but empirically for devs as a population, this is very clearly false. A large part of the reason for VSCode's near-takeover for new devs in the last few years is its frictionless setup for almost everything.
Vim advocates generally claim that investing time learning the Vim keybindings pays off as saved time during later work. But that's not what's happening here. If LSP just works in Helix, and requires fiddling with config files in Neovim, then Neovim is wasting my time, not teaching me something that will be valuable later on.