blog/content/code/redid-my-nvim-config/index.md

+++ title = "I Redid My NeoVim Configuration" date = 2022-01-19

[taxonomies] tags = ["vim", "neovim", "nvim", "config", "lsp", "treesitter"] +++

For some obscure reason, my NeoVim install decided it didn't want to display LSP warnings anymore. So I redid the whole configuration.

Believe me, I didn't do 'cause "OMG, so broken". I guess I could have tracked the problem to the way LanguageClient was installed -- it could be even out-of-date, 'cause I updated to NeoVim 0.6 recently -- but I also wanted to install the TreeSitter support, for better highlight. Those two factors were enough to me to try a different configuration, so I decided to do the full thing and rewrite the whole configuration file, using the Lua format.

I started with the post of Takuya Matsuyama, just as reference -- I'm not a user of a package manager (and there may lie the problem with some outdated plugin) and I really prefer to work with submodules and whatnot -- a way that is pretty close to what Pathogen does.

As I wanted to move some things from my old configuration to the new, I had to search on how to "translate" those. That's where I found a post by Heiker Curiel, which lists old configuration options and how they appear in the Lua config.

The result is that I have a brand sparkling NeoVim install, with all the bells and wristles:

The whole configuration file is in my personal Git repo.

What was left out?

When migrating, I few things I did not add in this new configuration:

• Fuzzy find: Previously I was using Skim for opening files with fuzzy find (e.g., type a few letters, see a list of the files with those letters). The Vim plugin for it was a bit flaky (sometimes it would completely ignore the typed input, which I think it meant it crashed somehow). But, 'cause I used only when bored, I decided that I won't use a fuzzy find; my favourite way of finding files is using the - shortcut, which I set to open :Ex.
• Snippets: UltiSnips was not working before, so I decided not to try it again. I'll probably look at some other option in the future.
• Per FileType configuration: Previously I had a bunch of autocommands to set specific configuration for each file type (e.g., Python files should always use spaces instead of tabs, but HTML should use tabs instead of spaces). I left it out mostly 'cause there is no Lua support for such commands yet, as far as I know (you can run VimScript commands still, but I'm being a bit retentive about mixing those).
• Auto-trim lines: My previous configuration used an autocommand for running a regular expression that would remove all tailing spaces in the lines. Because I use Rust mostly these days and the LSP configuration can run the autoformatter (rustfmt, in this case) and this already remove tailing spaces, I decided to leave this option out for now.