Try a Neovim distro without touching the config you already have

The reason most people never try another Neovim setup is not curiosity. It is that their own config took two years to get right and nobody wants to move it aside to audition something. There is a built in answer to that and it is one environment variable.

What NVIM_APPNAME does

Set NVIM_APPNAME and Neovim uses a different name for every directory it owns: config, data, state and cache. Point it at a folder and that setup gets its own everything. Your ~/.config/nvim is not read, not written, not touched.

git clone https://github.com/anderssonq/nvsinner.git ~/.config/nvsinner
NVIM_APPNAME=nvsinner nvim

On that first launch lazy.nvim bootstraps and installs everything. The language servers and the formatters install themselves through Mason as well, so there is no list of global npm packages to work through first.

If you would rather not think about any of that, NvSinner ships a one liner that clones it, installs a small launcher into ~/.local/bin and bootstraps the plugins, so afterwards the command is just nvsinner:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/anderssonq/nvsinner/main/install.sh | bash

Read that script before you run it. That is true of every install one liner on the internet, including mine, and it is 30 seconds of your life.

How to leave

This is the part that makes trying it free, so it belongs near the top rather than in a footnote. Delete the config directory and the data directory that carry the same name, and the experiment is gone. Nothing was shared with your existing setup, so there is nothing to untangle.

The same trick works for auditioning anything: clone a distro into ~/.config/thing, run NVIM_APPNAME=thing nvim, and keep a shell alias for whichever ones survive. You can hold three setups side by side and switch between them per terminal window.

One thing to check before you commit to any distro

Ask whether the plugin versions are pinned. NvSinner commits a lock file and updates with a restore rather than a sync, so an update gives you the exact versions the distro was tested with instead of whatever upstream merged this morning. A distro that does not pin will eventually break on a Tuesday for a reason that has nothing to do with you, and you will spend the afternoon on it.

What NvSinner does with all that setup, and why the AI lives in a terminal column instead of a plugin, is the previous note.