I decided to take some time over the holidays to redo my Neovim configuration, which I last spent any meaningful time on in 2019. I've been going back and forth on editors a lot for the last few years; last year, I spent the first six months of the year using Helix, which is a batteries-included editor based on the Kakoune editing model¹. I gave up on Helix after one too many crashes, and went back to Neovim.

The main goals of my recent config rewrite were:

1. Move from init.vim to init.lua
2. Get rid of unused/underused plugins
3. Move to LSP + Tree-sitter, for real

All of these things were successful! My new init.lua is about the same size as the old init.vim², but has about 20% fewer plugins and a lot more comments. I also switched from vim-plug to lazy.vim, which slightly improved startup time³ and provided a slightly more ergonomic way to configure stuff.

Here's a quick screenshot showing my solution for Advent of Code 2023 Day 25, in Neovim in iTerm 2:

Read on for more fun and exciting⁴ details.

Plugins

I'm now using 38 plugins, and I figured I'd do a quick overview of each of them!

WARNING: Vim plugins can execute arbitrary code as your user on your system. There is no sandboxing in any version of Vim that I'm aware of. Don't add a plugin if you aren't comfortable with the maintainer potentially having shell on your system. At the very least, look at the source and read the diffs before just blindly installing it. Eventually someone high-profile is going to be breached through a vim plugin and it's going to be sad for all of us.

actions-preview.nvim

Improves UI when making changes using Code Actions from a LSP. Unfortunately, none of the LSPs I use support code actions.

arena.nvim

A cool new buffer switcher; usually can guess which buffers I want to toggle between. I have this bound to <space>b

close-buffers.nvim

Adds :BDelete ex commands for bulk-closing buffers. In particular, :BDelete other closes everything except the open buffer, which is something I want to do sometimes when changing contexts.

conform.nvim

A new autoformatter that came out last year. Replaced all the other formatters with it (some of which were custom autocmds and some of which were neomake rules and some of which were plugins).

dsf.vim

Adds new text object sf (for "surrounding function call") for changing the function call when inside an argument list. This can probably be done with treesitter-textobjects now...

editorconfig-vim

Parses .editorconfig files to automatically apply things like indentation rules for a project.

fzf-lua

A mildly-improved version of fzf.vim, a wrapper around the excellent fzf fuzzy finder. Has a strange bug where sometimes if you type a p too fast while it's loading, it searches for your unnamed register instead of searching for the letter "p".

lazy.nvim

Plugin manager

lualine

Statusline plugin (replacing the previous lightline). I keep it pretty minimal.

night-owl

A colorscheme. I have a bunch of annoying highlight rules to override it because I'm too lazy to fork it and make my own changes. I'm still mixed on this, and go back and forth with just using default and manging colors in my terminal emulator.

nui.nvim

UI component library. Only a dependency of other plugins.

nvim-lspconfig

Configuration rules for Language Server Protocol configs. This is a super-verbose plugin and I bet there's a better way to do it.

In terms of LSPs, I'm using

• rust-analyzer
• ruby-lsp -- SO MUCH less crashy than solargraph
• python-lsp-server
• marksman
• lua-language-server

rust-analyzer is pretty good; the rest of them are... okay...

nvim-treesitter

This plugin lets me use tree-sitter for highlighting and indenting, which is way more reliable than regular expression based syntax rules. Helix, for what it's worth, exclusively uses tree-sitter.

nvim-treesitter-textobjects

Adds some text objects for selecting functions and whatnot with treesitter.

nvim-window

Adds an interactive quick-picker for jumping between splits in the current tab.

other.nvim

Adds a new command :Other which lets you open a related file. I spent a lot of time in Rails applications now, and they tend to make you jump between a lot of related files (controller, view, model, specs for each, etc), and this plugin is super-useful for opening these files.

splitjoin

Adds gS and gJ commands to improve joining and splitting lines. Super-helpful in Ruby when you want to change

next if foo.has.some.long.condition

into

if foo.has.some.long.condition
    next
end

Feels kind of gross to have to do that all the time, but, hey, that's Ruby for ya.

undotree

Visualize the undo tree. Can do other stuff, but I don't use anything else.

vim-argumentative

Adds some mappings and text objects for manipulating function arguments. Can probably be replaced by treesitter-textobjects. Maybe next year!

vim-buftabline

Show currently-open buffers in a similar UI to tabs.

vim-characterize

Improves the ga command to handle UTF-8.

vim-commentary

Adds gc command to toggle comments.

vim-easy-align

I hate code styles that require aligning around the middle (e.g., aligning a bunch of assignments around the = signs), but sometimes you have to interact with them, and :EasyAlign makes that much less annoying.

vim-fugitive

Does anyone not use this plugin

vim-indent-object

Adds text objects based on indentation levels (ai and ii). Mostly I only use this in Python.

vim-indentwise

Adds motions based on indentation levels ([-, ]-, [+, ]+, etc). Mostly I only use this in Python.

vim-just

Adds support for Justfiles. This will probably be mainline soon and then I can drop it.

vim-peekaboo

Absolutely essential plugin that previews the contents of registers. I don't know how I ever used them without it.

vim-puppet

Marginally improves vim support for Puppet manifests.

vim-rooter

Adds utilities for finding the root directory of the current project. I use the FindRootDirectory() function from this plugin in lots of autocmds and things. I prefer to have autochdir enabled, and then have various mappings that use FindRootDirectory to operate relative to the project root. I made a dumb little CLI tool called projroot which I use to do the same thing from my shell.

vim-ruby

Improves vim support for Ruby.

vim-sayonara

Adds the :Sayonara command, which is a better :bdelete. I have it bound to <leader>bq.

vim-sort-motion

Adds a mapping to sort a range. Is this better than '<,'>r!sort ? Who knows.

vim-startuptime

Profiling plugin. Added to write this blog post. Does it count?

vim-surround

Another very old and quintessential vim plugin. Change surrounding quotes/brackets/braces. Built in to many editors. I use things like cs"' all the time. I usually forget about the more sophisticated features, though.

vim-unimpaired

I probably added this 10 years ago. I don't know if I use any of the mappings it provides.

vim-vinegar

Some improvements to the netrw browser from Tim Pope.

zellij.nvim

Adds some fancy integration between neovim and zellij (which is a modern screen/tmux alternative).

Other Random Settings

Here are some of my favorite other settings, many of which now actually have comments explaining what they do.

-- show both numbers and relative numbers
vim.opt.number = true
vim.opt.relativenumber = true
-- highlight matching brackets when you type a closing one
vim.opt.showmatch = true
-- disable redrawing during macros
vim.opt.lazyredraw = true
-- tweak some completions
vim.opt.wildignore:append("*/tmp/*,*.so,*.swp,*.zip,*.pyc,*.o,*/target/*")
vim.opt.wildmode = "list:longest,full"

vim.keymap.set("i", "jk", "<ESC>")
vim.keymap.set("i", "kj", "<ESC>")
vim.keymap.set("n", "<space><space>", "<c-^>")
-- use arrow keys for manipulating buffers instead
vim.keymap.set("n", "<up>", ":buffers<cr>:buffer")
vim.keymap.set("n", "<down>", ":b#<cr>")
vim.keymap.set("n", "<left>", ":bp<cr>", { noremap = true, silent = true })
vim.keymap.set("n", "<right>", ":bn<cr>", { noremap = true, silent = true })
-- the diagnostic list is the "modern" replacement for the quickfix list, but has no default
-- bindings to navigate it???
vim.keymap.set("n", "[d", vim.diagnostic.goto_prev)
vim.keymap.set("n", "]d", vim.diagnostic.goto_next)


-- default indentation settings; overridden for many filetypes elsewhere in the config
vim.opt.shiftwidth = 4
vim.opt.softtabstop = 0
vim.opt.tabstop = 4
vim.opt.autoindent = true
vim.opt.expandtab = true

-- assume the /g flag on :s substitutions to replace all matches in a line:
vim.opt.gdefault = true

-- show hidden characters
vim.opt.list = true
vim.opt.listchars = "trail:~,tab:┊─,nbsp:␣,extends:◣,precedes:◢"
vim.opt.backspace = "indent,eol,start"

vim.opt.mouse = "a"

-- lualine handles this
vim.opt.showmode = false

-- default fold settings; overridden for many file types
vim.opt.foldcolumn = "1"
vim.opt.foldminlines = 10
vim.opt.foldenable = false

vim.opt.hidden = true

vim.g.netrw_liststyle = "3"
vim.g.netrw_list_hide = ".*\\.swp$,.*\\.DS_Store"
vim.cmd([[ autocmd FileType netrw setl bufhidden=wipe]])

-- change default for splits
vim.opt.splitright = true
vim.opt.diffopt = "filler,internal,algorithm:histogram,indent-heuristic"

if vim.fn.executable("rg") then
  vim.opt.grepprg = "rg --vimgrep --no-heading"
end

-- select last visual selection
vim.keymap.set("n", "gy", "`[v`]")

-- highlight yanks
vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd("TextYankPost", {
  callback = function()
    vim.highlight.on_yank()
  end,
})

vim.diagnostic.config({ virtual_text = true, signs = true })

What's Next?

A few remaining irritations:

• I don't like the way diagnostics work; I really like the quickfix list. I was using diaglist to try to merge them for a while, but it gets stale and can only be fixed by entirely quitting the editor. I think trouble.nvim is the popular plugin for doing this now, so I should probably investigate it.
• Need to spend more time looking at colorschemes...
• It would be nice to have a GUI neovim client that integrates with macOS a little better. I go through phases of using VimR (which was stuck on an out-of-date neovim binary for a very long time); I also tried using Neovide for a bit (which has fun animations but very little system integration).