Very cool to see this with such good discussion on Hacker News! I am the lead developer for AstroNvim (https://astronvim.com/) and am happy to answer any questions that anyone has. This new release has been a while in the making and is truly only possible because of the great community we have been building. We have been able to receive so much feedback, see how many of our users are using this pre-configuration to drive their own setups, and have been able to work together to meet their needs.
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.
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.