I've decided to build nvim from source instead of installing from Homebrew because I've had the experience of
running brew install <package> which attempted to update all existing packages, thus breaking something in my nvim.
Since nvim is such a critical tool I use for my living, I want to minimize the risk of it breaking and having to
spend time figuring out how to fix it.
Reference: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Building-Neovim
The steps from the official wiki are mostly applicable as-is. A few things to note when building in MacOS:
- Remember to have xcode-select installed.
- Remember to have Homebrew installed.
- Remember to have git installed
After building nvim successfully, you should see that the executable is installed under /usr/local/bin/nvim.
Make sure you have set your $PATH to /usr/local/bin and restarted your bash session.
Then you should be able to launch nvim.
Reference: https://github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Configuration
I decided to start from scratch, so I didn't use the nvim-from-vim guide. Here's how I configure from scratch.
- Create a
nvimfilesdirectory (that is this repository) in my usual workspace. - Then create a symbolink
.config/nvimpointing to thenvimfilesdirectory above. This will tell nvim where to load its configurations. - I use https://github.com/folke/lazy.nvim for plugin management, so the directory structure is setup accordingly. (This is my personal convention according to my own usage logic.)
├── init.lua // entry point for loading plugins
├── lazy-lock.json // lock file for plugins
├── lua // lua scripts
│ └── conf // plugin configurations
│ ├── lazy.lua // package manager configs
│ ├── mappings.lua // functions for key mappings
│ ├── settings.lua // global key bindings
│ ├── <...>.lua // plugin specific key bindings and configs
│ └── telescope.lua // plugin specific key bindings and configs
└── plugins // plugin installation, should be .gitignore-d
├── diffview.nvim
├── ...
└── telescope.nvim