neovim
Neovim is
a refactor, and sometimes redactor, in the tradition of Vim (which itself derives from Stevie). It is not a rewrite but a continuation and extension of Vim. Many clones and derivatives exist, some very clever—but none are Vim. Neovim is built for users who want the good parts of Vim, and more.
It’s supposed to be faster than vim at a lot of things, and there’s more extensible plugins and active communities, it would seem anyway, from my casual observation over the past year-ish (it’s October 2022 at the time of writing).
To be honest, I’d been using vim since 2011. Even though neovim had been around since 2015, since I was using vi before vim, I never really gave it a ton of thought. But recently there finally came a plugin that looked too good not to try, but was only available for neovim, so I figured, at very least, I should give it a go.
Update: It’s March 2023 and I’m now using neovim fully time :)
Getting Started with Neovim
You can install neovim with: brew install neovim
You can run neovim with: nvim
Config
The config file is located at:
| OS | Location |
|---|---|
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME | $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/nvim/init.lua (or init.vim) |
| Unix | ~/.config/nvim/init.lua (or init.vim) |
| Windows | ~/AppData/Local/nvim/init.lua (or init.vim) |
And if you want to just get your vim stuff working, you want to these contents in your ~/.config/nvim/init.vim:
set runtimepath^=~/.vim runtimepath+=~/.vim/after
let &packpath = &runtimepath
source ~/.vimrc
After that, launch neovim with nvim and then do your normal plugin manager flow.
Plugins
Most plugins will work out of the box, but you’ll probably have issues with Python plugins. You can learn more about those and other things to do with vim-plug, lazy, and packer here.
Known issues between vim and neovim
If you get an error complaining about bash\ --login, then it’s probably because of this line in your .vimrc:
" this works in vim, but not neovim
set shell=bash\ --login
Fix it by changing the above to:
" this ignores neovim when setting shell
if !has('nvim')
set shell=bash\ --login
endif
init.lua
This file should be located in ~/.config/nvim/init.lua, but you’ll have to create it. When you’re in lua land, vim-plug becomes more difficult in weird ways and the alternative does require a bit of a conversion, but it’s worth it, I think, because a lot of the latest trendy plugins are written in lua anyway, and you can still source vimscript files.
Converting an init.vim/.vimrc to an init.lua
setting variables
To start converting, you can fist grab all your variables, for instance:
" enable line number column
set number = true
and put them directory into your init.lua file. Then run an interactive sed to update them to lua’s vim interface like this, :%s/set /vim.opt./, which should then give you this:
-- enable line number column
vim.opt.number = true
Remapping a key
Here’s an example in my .vimrc:
" let spacebar allow me to fold the code
nnoremap <space> za
And here’s what that translated to in my init.lua:
-- let spacebar allow me to fold the code in normal mode
-- in vimscript, this was: nnoremap <space> za
vim.keymap.set('n', '<space>', 'za')
vim commands
Sometimes you have a command that doesn’t have a vim lua interface, or maybe you just can’t find it. There’s a vim.cmd you can call instead. Example:
I have my colorscheme set to spacechalk in my .vimrc like this:
colorscheme spacechalk
The eqivilent in my init.lua is this:
vim.cmd [[colorscheme spacechalk]]