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Installing and initial configuration

These dotfiles are targeted at software development, mainly with LSP and CMP as a completion engine. Many Plugins are optional and not loaded on startup for quick startup time. This happens all under control of the lazy plugin manager and should not require additional configuration.

Requirements

  • Neovim version 0.11 or later. Older versions will not work. You can install this in a variety of ways, using your local package management, compile from source or using a prebuilt binary installation. This is, however, not topic in these docs.
  • A working git Installation.
  • A supported terminal. On Windows, I recommend WezTerm, but others will work. On Linux, kitty is my favorite and macOS users may look into Ghostty or iTerm2 for best results.

First start

After cloning the repo to ~/.config/nvim (or the equivalent on Windows or macOS), you should start Neovim for the first time with the command: 

nvim --headless -c 'Lazy! sync' +qa
This will start Neovim without the UI (--headless), install all the plugins using the plugin manager and then quit. Usually, this should complete without errors unless your system lacks prerequisites like a working GIT installation.

Note

Note that this is ONLY required for a fresh install. Once all plugins are installed, you can launch Neovim normally without parameters.

Review settings

Please take some time and review the basic settings. They're all found in lua/config.lua and lua/options.lua. The first file holds non-Vim specific settings like theme options and such while options.lua defines vim options and some auto commands. Also relevant is init.vim which is still not 100% Lua, bust mostly contains auto commands and a few legacy vimscript functions. Custom keymappings are all in lua/keymap.lua and lua/plugins/command_center.lua.

Configuring LSP

This will need most of your attention. The configuration is built with manual LSP server installation in mind. You can use Mason to install servers, but as bare minimum, you have to check the contents of the vim.g.lsp_server_bin table in config.lua. This defines paths (and filenames ) of the supported LSP servers and is used in plugins/lsp.lua to setup LSP servers.

Plain mode

For those who prefer a clean environment (or for quick-editing single files) the plain mode is available. When active, certain plugins like the file tree are not loaded on startup. They are still available, but they do not clutter the UI by default and do not take time on startup. The same applies to the terminal split. The plain mode starts faster and offers a clean UI with just a single window. Most features (like CMP completion, LSP, Tree-sitter, Mason etc.) are still available and will be activated on demand.

To start plain mode, there are two options: Set the environment variable NVIM_PLAIN or start with --cmd "let g:want_plain=v:true" on the command line. The content of the environment variable does not matter, it can be set to anything. The options to activate the filetree (leader,) or the terminal split (f11) are still available. LSP will work and CMP will be loaded when you first enter InsertMode.

Keymapping

For the description and configuration options, see this file. There are many custom keyboard commands available.

CMP completion

CMP autocompletion is, by default, disabled in this config. Manual completion is available with C-Space in Insert mode and the command line. Autocomplete can be enabled by setting vim.g.config.cmp_autocomplete to true in config.lua. For everything else cmp-related, tweaking the settings in file lua/plugins/cmp.lua is the only available method.