Luan's Neovim distribution (alpha)

This Vim distribution is a re-write of luan/vimfiles with the goal of break free from the original vim and focus on supporting Neovim. Neovim is a faster moving project that is much more approachable for contributions.

If you're familiar with luan/vimfiles and want to know what has noticeably changed, try :help vimfiles-migrating (or just :help migrating). You can view that help file online here.

ALPHA disclaimer

This is currently an experiment to discover more efficient key mappings that are 1) more discoverable and 2) more efficient. The goal is to end up with a 1.0 version of the config that will then be stable and ultimately faster.

While we undergo this experiment I want to caution you against using this if you're not OK with having to fix some issues as you work. I will be glad to assist you if I am available.

If this does not scare you away, or if you still want to help, I'd like to encourage you to try this config and provide as much feedback as you can with regards to features and bugs. Also think about how the new mappings affect you carefully. Muscle memory from an old config may cause a little pain at first, but we're shooting for a better end result here.

Why a new repo?

The old repo may still be used by people stuck in the original vim for some reason, so breaking that compatibility could be frustrating for them.

Furthermore, I feel like some of the decisions made with regards to keybindings on the other repo need to be updated. Having a completely new fork makes it so users have to intentionally transition, giving them the change to realize that some things have changed.

Installation

This config is exclusive to Neovim, so you need to install it on your system first. You also need python and the python 3 client for Neovim installed(python 3 is important). Those are well documented processes and are platform dependent. At the moment I don't intend to provide an all-in-one installer as part of this config as we used to have on luan/vimfiles.

Dependencies: We'll need a few extra things installed in your system in order to properly setup everything:

curl: used to install the plugin manager.
npm: used to install JS tools and some language server binaries.
ripgrep: superfast grep replacement used by the search plugins.
fd: superfast fd replacement used by the file finding plugins.

Once you have that setup, all you have to do is clone this config in the right spot:

git clone https://github.com/luan/nvim ~/.config/nvim

Plugins will be automatically downloaded and setup as necessary.

Updating

The distribution checks for updates on boot and every hour when it's running. The check is non-disruptive and will only show messages passively when one of the following is true:

An update is available (and you should run :ConfigUpdate or :ConfigUpdate!).
An error occurred fetching the remove version.
You have local changes on your nvim config repo (you really shouldn't unless you're preparing a PR).

:ConfigUpdate updates the local config and you can also :ConfigUpdate! to update and force run the post-update hooks.

Customizing

In the config directory there's a special folder that is git ignored, that is $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/nvim/user, it is created on first boot based on the user.defaults on in this repo. The three hooks are:

user/before.vim: Runs before everything, useful to set globals that change plugin behavior
user/plug.vim: Runs during plugin setup, you can add your own choices of plugins here. More on adding plugins here
user/after.vim: Runs at the end, useful to override and map your own key bindings and configure your custom plugins. This is also where you'd change the colorscheme

It is recommended that you track your user settings on a separate repo and symlink them in here, see my dotfiles repo for an example.

Options

g:autosave: add a let g:autosave = 1 to your user/before.vim to enable autosaving.

Troubleshooting

In the even things behave incorrectly or the config becomes unstable in general, regular vim debugging methods apply. Check :checkhealth for clues on what's wrong with your setup.

Make sure language servers are installed for your language; :ConfigInstallLanguageServers installs a few that aren't automatically managed by other plugins (this should have happened automatically but it is sometimes good to make sure it runs successfully).

Sometimes plugin authors make backwards incompatible changes or push changes in ways that confuse vim-plug. A simple way to reset your plugin installation and start over is to remove them from the load path in ~/.local/share/nvim/plugged which can be run with :ConfigResetAllPluginsReallyDoIt!.

glestaris/nvim