SnaxVim Outpaces AstroNvim, LazyVim, NvChad and kickstart in Startup Benchmarks

A benchmark published on DEV Community compares the startup performance of SnaxVim, a minimal 10-plugin Neovim setup, against four popular Neovim distributions: AstroNvim, kickstart.nvim, LazyVim, and NvChad. Testing was conducted on a Linux machine with an Intel Core i7-10510U processor and an NVMe SSD, using three distinct measurement methods — hyperfine wall-clock timing, vim-startuptime, and lazy.nvim's internal startup metric. Each method captures a different aspect of startup performance, so absolute values across methods are not directly comparable. SnaxVim recorded the fastest averages across all three methods, including 21.8 ms via hyperfine and 11.0 ms via vim-startuptime, while NvChad was the closest competitor at 24.1 ms and 14.1 ms respectively. The results suggest that minimizing plugin count, as SnaxVim does by design, has a measurable positive impact on Neovim startup speed.