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Setting up Neovim as an IDE

Javier Ríos

Since I started coding, Visual Studio Code has been my preferred editor. It may be due to its simplicity, its support for a plethora of languages or its vast extensions marketplace. Nonetheless, it has some flaws. For instance, it is not privacy-aware.

Nonetheless, I couldn't use Visual Studio Code during my pool at Epitech, so I needed to use something else. In my quest for a worthy replacement for Visual Studio Code, I stumbled upon some timeless editors such as vim and emacs. The former features an extensible, "drop-in" vim with support for Lua plugins and a built-in LSP client update, called Neovim.

Installing Neovim

Grab a package manager of your own choice and install Neovim. Take into consideration that we will need Neovim 0.8.X to have everything working flawlessly. I will use brew.

javii@mbp % brew install neovim

Once that's done check the version. The command alias for Neovim is nvim.

javii@mbp % nvim --version
NVIM v0.8.2

Preparing Neovim

Neovim's default appearance bears a lot of resemblance to Vim's. That is because they are almost the same! We will use a handy, highly customizable base configuration called NvChad, which does the heavy lifting for us. It already comes with a wide variety of plugins installed for us.

To take advantage of NvChad, you must have a NerdFont setup for your terminal. Don't forget to remove ~/.local/share/nvim, and backup ~/.config/nvim in case you already had a configuration setup.

Now, let's install NvChad by running the following command.

javii@mbp % git clone https://github.com/NvChad/NvChad ~/.config/nvim --depth 1 && nvim

Configuring Neovim

If we navigate to ~/.config/nvim, we will see a folder structure like this.

javii@mbp % tree ~/.config/nvim
/Users/javii/.config/nvim
├── LICENSE
├── init.lua
├── lua
│   ├── core
│   │   ├── default_config.lua
│   │   ├── init.lua
│   │   ├── lazy_load.lua
│   │   ├── mappings.lua
│   │   ├── options.lua
│   │   └── utils.lua
│   └── plugins
│       ├── configs
│       │   ├── alpha.lua
│       │   ├── cmp.lua
│       │   ├── lspconfig.lua
│       │   ├── mason.lua
│       │   ├── nvimtree.lua
│       │   ├── nvterm.lua
│       │   ├── others.lua
│       │   ├── telescope.lua
│       │   ├── treesitter.lua
│       │   └── whichkey.lua
│       └── init.lua
└── plugin
    └── packer_compiled.lua

All the interesting stuff happens in the lua folder. The core folder has all the default configurations. We will not directly override this. The plugins folder has all the configurations for the pre-installed plugins.

NvChad has a built-in update system. It pulls the most recent changes from GitHub and overwrites both the core and plugins directories. Due to this, we will create a new directory, custom, inside the lua directory, in which we will add our custom configuration.

We will first create an important file, chadrc.lua. It is in charge of overriding NvChad's default config. Here we set onedark as our default theme, and we disable transparency for the background.

-- ~/.config/nvim/lua/custom/chadrc.lua

local M = {};

M.ui = {
    theme = "onedark",
    transparency = false,
}

M.plugins = require "custom.plugins"

M.mappings = require "custom.mappings"

return M;

Let's create some custom mappings for Neovim. To do that, we create mappings.lua in the same folder. The general Object is divided into insert, normal, terminal, ex and visual, which are some of Neovim's modes.

-- ~/.config/nvim/lua/custom/mappings.lua

local M = {}

M.general = {
  n = {
    [";s"] = { ":wq", "Save and exit", opts = { nowait = true } },
  },
}

return M

We mapped the sequence ;s in the normal mode to execute the command wq, which writes the file and quits. This is just an example to show how to create or overwrite already existing mappings by core/mappings.lua configuration.

Adding plugins

NvChad already comes with a wide variety of plugins installed, and it is extremely easy to add new ones. Create a folder plugins inside custom, and add this to init.lua. The first entry overrides NvChad's lspconfig, and the second one adds a new plugin.

-- ~/.config/nvim/lua/custom/plugins/init.lua

return {
    ["neovim/nvim-lspconfig"] = {
        config = function ()
            require "plugins.configs.lspconfig"
            require "custom.plugins.lspconfig"
        end,
    },
    ["andweeb/presence.nvim"] = {
        config = function()
            require("presence"):setup({
                auto_update = true,
                main_image = "file",
                buttons = false,
            })
    },
}

Now we need to create lspconfig.lua inside the same directory as init.lua to add our custom config, and add the following code. Take into consideration that you must have the LSPs installed via :MasonInstall <lsp> inside Neovim. Check this file for all the available LSPs, and when installed, add them to the servers variable.

-- ~/.config/nvim/lua/custom/plugins/lspconfig.lua

local on_attach = require("plugins.configs.lspconfig").on_attach
local capabilities = require("plugins.configs.lspconfig").capabilities

local lspconfig = require "lspconfig"

local servers = {"hls", "denols", "clangd", "solargraph" }

for _, lsp in ipairs(servers) do
  lspconfig[lsp].setup {
    on_attach = on_attach,
    capabilities = capabilities,
  }
end

Once everything is done, your custom folder structure should look like this.

javii@mbp % tree ~/.config/nvim/lua/custom
/Users/javii/.config/nvim/lua/custom
├── chadrc.lua
├── init.lua
├── mappings.lua
└── plugins
    ├── init.lua
    └── lspconfig.lua

In order to finish, run this command to re-compile the new plugins we are using.

javii@mbp % nvim +:PackerSync

Wrapping up

Now that we have successfully configured everything, try creating a new file main.c and start typing this, for instance.

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
    printf("Hello %s!\n", "neovim");
    return 0;
}

You should see clang helping you with the autocomplete! All the key mappings are located in ~/.config/nvim/lua/core/mappings.lua, try to take a look and discover new mappings. You can easily override them.

You will also see some mappings being <leader> and some letters. In the case of NvChad, it corresponds to the space key. One cool command is <leader>th, to change themes, and <leader>uu, to update NvChad. Should you want to delete NvChad, execute the following commands.

javii@mbp % rm -rf ~/.config/nvim
javii@mbp % rm -rf ~/.local/share/nvim
javii@mbp % rm -rf ~/.cache/nvim