Soft fork and merge non-controversial fixes and improvments

[oriori1703]

There hasn't been any real maintainer activity since the middle of May. This seem to coincide with a comment from @feoh on my PR.

I feel kinda bad for possibly causing the burnout of the only active maintainer of kickstart with my PR , so I decided to try ease the maintenance burned by reviewing most of the open PRs and merging them to my fork.

Important

If you are a new kickstart user, I would suggest you use those changes until they are merged into this repo.
I would try to keep this branch maintained until that point.

Those merged PRs include fixes for major and common reported issues (lsp for nvim 0.11, Mason 2.0, and guess-indent fix), as well as some non conversational (IMO) fixes and improvements (unlike my snacks PR :)
The merged PRs are:

• feat(diagnostics): Add virtual_lines for discoverability #1463
• feat(grep-string): works with visual selection too #1605
• fix: Load guess-indent.nvim #1532
• fix: remove unnecessary diagnostic config lines #1550
• feat: add toggle to show/hide diagnostics #1616
• feat: improved lsp setup for nvim > 0.11 #1590
• Turn on StyLua's collapse_simple_statement  #1484
• Add type hints to plugin options where possible #1494
• feat: Enhances breakpoint editing #1534
• docs: Add documentation for lazy's init key #1582
• docs: Document methods to get the latest neovim #1626
• Raise the minimum nvim version to 0.11 #1631
• fix: adjust after 'mini.nvim' transfer to 'nvim-mini' org #1713
• Add 'gr' group to which-keys #1695
• chore: fix help tag #1671
• Fixed a bug in blink.cmp causing editor freezes on WSL2 systems #1634 not needed after this change in blink
• Add .DS_Store to .gitignore #1637
• Enhance Kickstart.nvim UX with Buffer Completions, Options, and Autocommands #1642

@feoh If the burnout is indeed my fault, I'm deeply sorry. Please accept this PR as an apology 😄
Let me know if there is anything else I could do to help.

Edit:
I now also merged these changes to dam9000's modular kickstart.
It can be found at the maintained-upstream-modular branch.

[oriori1703]

Also @dam9000 , I'm actually using a fork of your modular kickstart, so let me know if you would like me to also adapt those changes to your fork :D

[dam9000]

@oriori1703 personally I don't need that but don't let me stop you if you wish to.
I will keep updating the modular fork following the official kickstart, currently I don't plan to deviate from it.

[gmnz]

@oriori1703 Sounds good, guess I'll be switching to your fork soon. Using @dam9000 's modular too.

[oriori1703]

I now also merged these changes to dam9000's modular kickstart.
It can be found at the maintained-upstream-modular branch.

[szechp]

nice one, i also used your pr for snacks and made an optional addon for nvim kickstart modular, but it would actually be better to do this here, but i never gotten around to it dam9000#74

(ps, why are you not a maintainer for this repo yet, lol)

[gmnz]

nice one, i also used your pr for snacks and made an optional addon for nvim kickstart modular, but it would actually be better to do this here, but i never gotten around to it dam9000#74

(ps, why are you not a maintainer for this repo yet, lol)

Why haven't you forked this repo a year ago and made your fork more popular than the main repo? ;-) lol ;-) You should be thankful for devs that do stuff for free for other devs instead of criticizing them for "not doing enough". ;-)

[szechp]

nice one, i also used your pr for snacks and made an optional addon for nvim kickstart modular, but it would actually be better to do this here, but i never gotten around to it dam9000#74
(ps, why are you not a maintainer for this repo yet, lol)

Why haven't you forked this repo a year ago and made your fork more popular than the main repo? ;-) lol ;-) You should be thankful for devs that do stuff for free for other devs instead of criticizing them for "not doing enough". ;-)

I don't know how you got the idea that I was telling anyone they were not doing enough? (I'm a contributer to this repo btw, so actually did just that, I forked it and contributed to it)

If you're referring to my "ps, why are you not a maintainer for this repo yet, lol": this was a tongue in cheek way to acknowledge the work @oriori1703 does.

Let's focus on the issue ok. You can read here why I'm struggling to wrap my head around this: #1481 (comment)

[szechp]

maybe you like this one as well:

#1632

[feoh]

Hiya @oriori1703 - just want to clarify.

Nobody in particular "caused" burn out. My problem here is that this repo is in a constant state of push/pull with folks wanting new shiny and others being VERY VEHEMENTLY opposed to said shiny :)

I'd be happy to merge these changes if someone else in the community approves them. I've read through and they all look reasonable but I don't have time to test them all as I don't use kickstart anymore (And you don't either! I think this repo should be retired, personally.)

As to adding maintainers: I'd LOVE to. I'd be happy to hand over the keys to someone else, but thst's not in my power. I'm just a contributor with merge rights, not a repo owner. You'll need to get one of them to notice you and add you as a maintainer.

So, to recap:

• Nobody caused anything. Don't feel obligated :)
• If someone wants to approve this giant diff I'd be happy to merge it. I don't have time to test thoroughly
• Honestly I think this repo should be archived. It's almost impossible to maintain, and if anyone doubts that, just look at the history of people diving in, making a bunch of changes, and then vanishing when the pain becomes too great :)

[theammir]

I don't use kickstart anymore (And you don't either! I think this repo should be retired, personally.)

Isn't that the whole point of the repo? You only use it once in its preconfigured state, and then morph it.
At the same time, though, it's a nice source of up-to-date tweaks that somebody else had time for. Without kickstart, we're kind of stuck with occasionally stealing snippets from random users, and it's often rather complicated when structure and plugins differ too much. I think of kickstart as a rolling release config, so to say: I might not use telescope any more, but once in a while even tree-sitter makes a new master branch, apparently.

Although, I do feel like I'm a continuation to that pages-long discussion under the snacks PR.

[szechp]

@tjdevries can you add someone else as a maintainer when @feoh doesnt want to continue anymore? @oriori1703 would be nice :)

[Jacobus-afk]

It's nice to ever so often check in on the repo to see if there are new plugins, or new native neovim improvements available

It was great to just be able to grab the snacks picker config, or the new lsp-config implementation when i finally got around to building my config..

I wonder if a similar model to how ghostty handles issues and prs wont help to get rid of a bit of the noise? i.e. only discussions are open for the peanut gallery, and then contributors with elevated rights can decide if the dicussion warrants an issue/pr?

[szechp]

I would like that very much. But right now we only have feoh as a maintainer, but he doesn't see the point of this repo anymore. So we are essentially stuck unmaintained.

[szechp]

• Honestly I think this repo should be archived. It's almost impossible to maintain, and if anyone doubts that, just look at the history of people diving in, making a bunch of changes, and then vanishing when the pain becomes too great :)

it would be a shame if this repo just fizzled out. even if i have my own setup based on kickstart its always nice to check back and maybe merge fixes and so on. so what do you guys suggest? @dam9000 @oriori1703 @feoh? can we pass this on to another maintainer? I have limited time, but i could do it too.

at least opening discussions to get rid of the noise in here would be nice.

[gmnz]

@oriori1703 Thanks for keeping the project alive. 👍

[tjdevries]

@oriori1703 would you be interested in being a maintainer on the project? I could also talk to neovim core team about passing a bit more oversight to them. I just don't have time to maintain right now, but would be happy to see someone keep things moving here

[oriori1703]

@oriori1703 would you be interested in being a maintainer on the project?

I would be honored to 😁

[oriori1703]

Hey @tjdevries - just wanted to follow up on your offer to help maintain the project.
Still very happy to do so and to help keep PRs and issues moving forward.
Let me know if there’s anything I can do on my end to get things set up.

[codevogel]

@oriori1703

Thanks for wanting to keep the project alive. I really appreciate it.

Maybe we should come up with a long-term plan for this repo.
You're doing some awesome work, but my immediate thought is, what if you stop maintaining it in the future?

I get that the point of this repo never was to provide a long term support solution, or a neovim distribution, but it's eery to see how stale this repository has become, even with its popularity. I'd wholeheartedly support you becoming a maintainer, but I think we should also probably address what will happen when you inevitably stop maintaining it.

[szechp]

@tjdevries is active on github all the time, but he might be busy. But can you do this quick change? should only be a couple of minutes, right?

If not, we can always completely switch over to https://github.com/oriori1703/kickstart-modular.nvim and continue from there, is this something you would consider @oriori1703 ?

[oriori1703]

If not, we can always completely switch over to https://github.com/oriori1703/kickstart-modular.nvim and continue from there, is this something you would consider @oriori1703 ?

I’m considering it, but I'd rather try to revive this repo first if possible - I'd hate to split the community.

[hrfried]

@tjdevries @feoh Can we please get maintainership passed off to @oriori1703, who seems willing and capable of handling? Normally I'd recommend kickstart to new neovim users, but unfortunately in its current state I've had to avoid doing so. It's also been causing a lot of headache to those of us who based our configs off of kickstart.

I haven't really been part of these discussions and have only been parsing the github issues for a while, so maybe there are others who have expressed interest in maintaining—I just know I've seen @oriori1703 pop up a number of times and they seem qualified and interested. There may be others, and there are definitely better people than me to discuss this. I just know that I've always loved and recommended kickstart, and don't want to see it fall into disrepair/deprecation.

If this isn't an option, can you at least give the community a heads up so we can know that it's time to pack up and migrate to something else?

[codevogel]

@oriori1703 At this point, it feels like we may need to consider moving forward independently. The repository has been fairly quiet for a while, and your request is completely reasonable: Transferring ownership wouldn't take much time. Given that there hasn’t been any response for over a month, it seems unlikely we'll get one soon. @tjdevries sorry to bother you about this, but I want to give it one last shot.

I'd be happy to help you get a new repo off the ground. A modular, kickstart-style configuration could really benefit a lot of people (kickstart is what helped me get into Neovim myself), and given that kickstart originated as a monolithic file, a more modular structure would also make it easier to navigate the kinds of discussions that understandably contributed to @feoh’s burnout. A modular structure would make it easier to opt in or out of features, and thus would keep things flexible without putting too much pressure on maintainers on making tough decisions that one crowd might prefer.

That being said - let's not fall back into this situation once more. We should first come up with a long-term-support plan, and think about what would happen when any of the maintainers reach a stage where we no longer can, or want to put time and effort into an open-source project that noone's being paid for. Let's be realistic about things from the get-go.

[alessio-perugini]

Ping for @tjdevries @feoh to give the ownership to @oriori1703

[feoh]

Hi. Just to be clear I think maintaining this repo is an impossibility.

1. it's BIG. Like, the whole thing really needs an update and rethink
2. It's impossible to reconcile all the different directions people want this thing to go.

It's like a singularity where the only way out is through - were it mine (It's NOT! I just have merge privs) I'd archive this repository and direct people to the excellent Neovim built in getting started instructions.

[TomJGooding]

I hope kickstart.nvim doesn't continue to rot or end up archived, as it provides an invaluable resource for getting started in Neovim.

I don't understand what makes this repo impossible to maintain. Compared to other projects, how is it "BIG"? I sympathise with reconciling all the different directions people want this project to take, but how is that really any different from other projects?

[szechp]

Hi. Just to be clear I think maintaining this repo is an impossibility.

1. it's BIG. Like, the whole thing really needs an update and rethink
2. It's impossible to reconcile all the different directions people want this thing to go.

It's like a singularity where the only way out is through - were it mine (It's NOT! I just have merge privs) I'd archive this repository and direct people to the excellent Neovim built in getting started instructions.

I think the modular design proposed by @dam9000 would have saved a lot of headache. This way it would only require maintenance of a lean and stripped set of core files, that only contain the absolute basics. I would even exclude stuff like pickers and such, just the barest minimum.

It would be also possible to add optional plugin configs as files, where people can go wild, which has already been tried in the current setup but introduced a lot of headaches. This could even live in a separate repo, idk.

But the way its now I totally agree. It's too opinionated.

[tjdevries]

Sorry @oriori1703 - my gh notifications are a mess from forever and just got behind on everything. any way i can reach you to DM/email/etc somehow?

[oriori1703]

Sorry @oriori1703 - my gh notifications are a mess from forever and just got behind on everything. any way i can reach you to DM/email/etc somehow?

You can email me at oriori1703@gmail.com, or DM me on discord at ori_perry.

[tjdevries]

cool, sent a discord friend request

[rez1coder]

It's been 3 weeks. Did TJ agree to make you a maintainer? @oriori1703