Exploring Neovim Configs can be Tiring

I want a faster way to understand a Neovim setup than grepping through Lua or reading through multiple websites documentation.
Right now I can sort of discover keymaps via a picker :lua Snacks.picker.keymap(), :Telescope keymaps, or the classic :map, :imap, etc., and I can read plugin help—but there’s no single place that surfaces everything (keymaps, commands, plugin tweaks) in one go.

Where Current Tools Fall Short

Put together, that’s a lot of jumping around and context switching.

My Configs So Far

I have been using kickstart.nvim for a while now and this rabbit hole began when I decided it was time to upgrade my own config and figured I’d see what other distros were doing right. I tried out LazyVim, LunarVim, NvChad, and friends.

Kickstart

You read the entire config and own it. I still had blind spots (the lspconfig / Mason interactions), but I still felt like I knew my config and where to change something if I needed to. Because the expected use is to pull the config and start modifying it for your own use, I found upgrading your current kickstart config can get difficult. You have to handle merge conflicts, so of which can include major refactorings and outright changes to the plugins used by the config. This means that an upgrade is more than simply resolving merge conflicts to options, you might need to be ready to understand the config anew.

This is why I found it easier to simply restart the config whenever I am upgrading kickstart. It's actually a pretty nice process since on every upgrade you understand neovim much more and can make deeper and more specific changes.

Full-featured distros

A bunch of Lua wires everything up, but these distros don't usually expect the average user to read through them. You’re meant to override their configs to customize them, yet finding the right lever is a scavenger hunt. (I will admit that only LazyVim got a real trial. I only played around a bit with LunarVim)

Bottom line: distro exploration feels like spelunking without a headlamp.

Exploration Fatigue

It might very well be a skill issue on my part but I find that exploring a config to find out keymaps, commands and other configured settings quite scattered and not straightforward at all.

Quick demo: find where a mapping is defined

I use this when I've spotted a mapping but don’t know which plugin or file created it.

" Normal-mode maps that start with <leader>f
:verbose nmap <leader>f
" Output ends with something like:
"     Last set from /path/to/plugin/file.lua line 42

When I am exploring things generally, this is what I do.

" List all normal-mode keymaps via Telescope
:Telescope keymaps mode=n

" Get every mapping (across all modes) and dump to a scratch buffer
:lua vim.print(vim.tbl_map(function(m) return m.lhs end, vim.api.nvim_get_keymap('')))

" Fuzzy-find every help tag—great for plugin docs
:Telescope help_tags

" Jump straight to the help page for a specific plugin (e.g. Telescope)
:help telescope.nvim
" (Most plugins expose a tag that matches their repo name.)

Each of these helps, but none gives me the single dashboard I’m after.

A Better Approach?: A Queryable Neovim

Imagine chatting with your editor:

“What keymaps are active right now?” “Who defines gx, and where?” “List all Telescope customisations.”

Simply dumping config files into an LLM hits token limits on big distros. A more scalable path is to expose runtime APIs an LLM can call:

• list installed plugins
• fetch help for any command/topic
• enumerate active keymaps with their sources

With that, an MCP-style RPC server could feed structured answers to the model. There’s already a promising skeleton: bigcodegen/mcp-neovim-server aimed at editing assistance; its architecture looks adaptable for this my use-case. I might be able to modify it to do what I want.

Have you hacked on something similar, or know plugins I’ve missed? Drop me a note. I’d love to swap ideas and maybe prototype this together.