Afnan Enayet

My Neovim Development Setup

It’s been a while since I wrote about my Neovim setup. Since my last post, my nvim config has grown to be a little more sophisticated, and I finally worked out autocompletion and linting for all of the languages I work with.

Here’s what my editor looks like:

neovim rust

I have posted my full neovim configuration on Github

Split up your init.vim

I had a horribly long init.vim file before. It gets clunky to manage and long files are ugly. It’s highly recommended that you split up your init.vim files into more manageable chunks. The way you can do this is by sourcing each chunk in your main init.vim file. Suppose we have a file for our deoplete settings, and another file for our language client settings. Our init.vim file could look something like this:

source $HOME/.config/nvim/config/deoplete.vim
source $HOME/.config/nvim/config/lc.vim

And in config/lc.vim and config/deoplete.vim, you could have whatever settings pertaining to each plugin that you want. I personally have my config files split up in the following manner:

config
├── 01.plugins.vim
├── 02.init.vim
├── 03.powerline.vim
├── 04.deoplete.vim
├── 05.language_client.vim
└── 06.keybindings.vim

My init.vim file looks like this:

for f in split(glob('~/.config/nvim/config/*.vim'), '\n')
    exe 'source' f
endfor

Credit: Thanks to Igor Epstein for pointing out I can use a regex to grab multiple files in a directory and clean up my init.vim config.

Note that I had to put the plugins.vim file first because it contains everything pertaining to my package manager, dein, and dein has some scripts it needs to run first in Neovim. The order that you put these scripts in does matter, as they effectively will be set up in order. Everything in plugins.vim will be run before everything in the other files in my case. init.vim files can get messy, and this offers a way to clean up your setup and separate your neovim/vim config into logical units.

Managing packages

There are a lot of package managers for Neovim/vim out there. People have different preferences, I have no strong feelings one way or the other. I personally use dein, which has served me pretty well. It uses all of the great async features in Vim 8/Neovim and is pretty easy to use.

My plugins.vim file has all of the settings pertaining to dein, as well as the dein startup scripts that it needs to run when vim/nvim boots up.

After setting it up, installing plugins is as easy as:

call dein#install("github-username/repo-name")

Note that it doesn’t automatically update plugins by default. I manually update my plugins. You can just call :call dein#update() in Neovim, and dein will upgrade all of your plugins for you.

Autocompletion and linting

I use deoplete for completion in Neovim. Deoplete itself is just an autocompletion engine, you need to install sources for it to be able to give you suggestions relevant to whatever you’re working on. I primarily use language servers for autocompletion, but there are also non-language server options that work perfectly fine with deoplete.

Configuring deoplete

Deoplete is powered by completion sources, and it has a few default ones that really annoyed me. For example, buffer based completion was fairly unhelpful for me. I don’t want autocompletion in a markdown or text file, and I only want to have completion from meaningful symbols. You can set the completion sources for deoplete, and also have completion enabled on a per-buffer basis.

I have deoplete completion disabled by default

" disable autocomplete by default
let b:deoplete_disable_auto_complete=1
let g:deoplete_disable_auto_complete=1

I also set sources to be empty by default

let g:deoplete#sources = {}

And lastly, I don’t want any autocompletion when I’m writing strings and comments.

" Disable the candidates in Comment/String syntaxes.
call deoplete#custom#source('_',
            \ 'disabled_syntaxes', ['Comment', 'String'])

You can set sources per language like this

call deoplete#custom#option('sources', {
    \ 'python': ['LanguageClient'],
\})

and replace python which whatever language(s) you want.

Note: thanks to Steve Vermeulen for notifying me about the new convention for setting language server settings due to updates from deoplete.

Completion sources and language servers

If you want to use a language client, I would suggest using the LanguageClient-neovim plugin. Note that this source is called LanguageClient, so if you want to use a language server for a language, you need to set it up for the LanguageClient plugin, then set the source for that language to be LanguageClient. One thing that tripped me up when trying to set up sources for deoplete was that I didn’t find good documentation for what each plugin is named. For example, deoplete-rust uses racer, but the name of the source is rust, but deoplete-jedi has a source called jedi.

Here are some sources/language servers you can use (I’ve included the names of the sources for entries that aren’t language servers).

I only use language servers for development (except when editing vim files).

Other plugins

Some of my other favorite plugins are:

© 2018 Afnan Enayet. All rights reserved.