Neovim

Neovim: the scary text editor that doesn’t use a mouse. It always seemed interesting to me, though i never had the motivation to fully commit to it.

I installed Neovim using sudo pacman -S nvim and ran the command nvim. Inside, using the command :Tutor i started doing the tutorial, which goes over:

• all the basic movement keys like hjkl for left, down, up, and right respectively
• saving (writing) a file with :w and quitting a file with :q (or :wq to write-quit, :q! to force quit in case there’s unwritten changes)

Plugins

The reason i chose Neovim over regular ‘ol Vim is because, for starters, Neovim looks better out of the box, but also because it supports a bunch of plugins and themes, all written in lua.

For the plugins i will be using lazy.nvim.

For the setup you have two options: single file and multi file. I went with single file for its simplicity.

Inside ~/.config/nvim/init.lua, i added the line:

require("config.lazy")

And inside ~/.config/nvim/lua/config/lazy.lua, i added:

-- Bootstrap lazy.nvim
local lazypath = vim.fn.stdpath("data") .. "/lazy/lazy.nvim"
if not (vim.uv or vim.loop).fs_stat(lazypath) then
  local lazyrepo = "https://github.com/folke/lazy.nvim.git"
  local out = vim.fn.system({ "git", "clone", "--filter=blob:none", "--branch=stable", lazyrepo, lazypath })
  if vim.v.shell_error ~= 0 then
    vim.api.nvim_echo({
      { "Failed to clone lazy.nvim:\n", "ErrorMsg" },
      { out, "WarningMsg" },
      { "\nPress any key to exit..." },
    }, true, {})
    vim.fn.getchar()
    os.exit(1)
  end
end
vim.opt.rtp:prepend(lazypath)
-- Set these up before setting up lazy
vim.g.mapleader = " " 
vim.g.maplocalleader = "\\"
 
-- Setup lazy.nvim
require("lazy").setup({
  	spec = {
	  	-- Plugins go here
  	},
    -- Automatically check for updates
  	checker = { enabled = true }
})

This is all you need to get the base of lazy working. Plugins go inside the setup, and you can manage lazy with the command :Lazy. Let’s try that now.

Very empty, but it works. I’ll quit by writing :q. Let’s install some plugins, starting with a nicer theme. Since other apps already use everforest, i went with that one (source).