Tips on Neovim

Things on this page are fragmentary and immature notes/thoughts of the author. Please read with your own judgement!

Installation¶

Using Homebrew on Linux/macOS (Recommended)¶

brew install neovim

This is the recommended way to install Neovim.

Ubuntu / Debian¶

sudo apt update
sudo apt install neovim

Note that the Neovim installed might be an old version. Use Homebrew of AppImage instead if you want a newer version of Neovim.

Tips and Traps¶

AstroNvim is the BEST configuration framework for NeoVim.
NeoVim with a complicated configuration (e.g., AstroNvim, SpaceVim, etc) might be too slow when editing a large (>50M) text file. One trick helps is to disable plugins when editing large files. For example, you can use the following command to edit a large file without loading plugins.
```
nvim --noplugin /path/to/large/text/file
```
You can open terminals using the ToggleTerm.nvim plugin (which comes with AstroNvim). It is preferred to Neovim’s built-in command :term. As a matter of fact, ToggleTerm.nvim is wrapper over the built-in feature :term to make terminals more user fiendly and easier to manage.
- :term opens a terminal with CWD being the user’s home directory while ToggleTerm.nvim opens a terminal within the same directory as the current buffer.
- An embedded terminal within Neovim is actually a Neovim buffer in the terminal mode. You can escape (quit) the terminal model using Ctrl-\ Ctrl-N, which allows you to manipulate it as a regualr (but read-only) Neovim buffer. For example, you can copy output of commands from the terminal buffer to another buffer.
NVIM_APPNAME is an environment variable that allows you to manage and switch between multiple, completely isolated Neovim configurations. By changing this variable, you change the subfolder name where Neovim looks for your configurations, plugins, caches, and state files. Instead of defaulting to ~/.config/nvim, it will target ~/.config/$NVIM_APPNAME. This can be extremly useful if you have to keep multiple Neovim configurations. For example, if you use Firenvim with Neovim and want to use a different configuration for it.

Manage Language Servers¶

Python¶

:LspInstall ruff pyright