This is my Neovim configuration for all the platforms I use. init.vim is for terminal Neovim and ginit.vim is for GUI client for Neovim (currently I am using neovim-qt) on Windows.

My configurations are heavily documented to make it as clear as possible. While you can download the whole configuraiton and replace yours, it is not recommened to do so. Good configurations are personal. Everyone should have his/her own unique configurations. You are encouraged to copy from this configuration the part you feel useful and add it to your own configuration.

Features

Auto-completion for Python via Deoplete.
Source code linting via Neomake.
Beautiful status line via vim-airline.
Powerful sidebar via Nerdtree.
Tags navigation via tagbar.
Fast buffer jump via vim-sneak.
Open a file in current project quickly via fzf.

How to Install Neovim

Linux

Follow the official guide and download the appimage from the release page.

For some Linux systems, you may not be able to run the appimage. You can directly download the tar ball from here and extract it.

Windows

The easiest way to install Neovim on Windows is via chocolatey. First, install chocolatey. Then you can install neovim easily with

# install latest version of neovim
# choco install neovim --pre

choco install neovim

To keep up-to-date with the latest features of Neovim, you may download the latest release from GitHub and extract it.

Mac

It is recommended to install neovim via Homebrew on maxOS. Simply run the following command:

# if you want to install latest version of neovim
# brew install --HEAD neovim

brew install neovim

After Neovim is installed, you may need to add the directory where the neovim executable (nvim on Linux and Mac, nvim.exe on Windows) resides to your system PATH.

Make sure that you can call nvim from the command line after all these setup.

Pre-requisite

There are a few requirements if you want to use Neovim for efficient editing.

Python

To use auto-completion and other features, you need to install Python3. The easiest way to install Python3 is via Anaconda.

pynvim

Neovim relies on pynvim to communiate with plugins which utilizes its Python binding. Pynvim is required by plugin such as Deoplete.

Jedi

For Python source auto-completion to work, you need to install Jedi:

pip install jedi

Git

Git is used by plugin manager vim-plug to download plugins from Github or other Git repositories.

Since Git is usually pre-installed on Linux and Mac, you do not need to worry if you are on these two platforms. For Windows, install Git for Windows and make sure you can call git from command line.

ctags

In order to use tags related plugins such as tagbar and gutentags, you need to install a ctags distribution. Universal ctags is preferred.

To install ctags on Mac, use Homebrew. To install it Windows, use chocolatey:

choco install universal-ctags

To install it on Linux, you need to build it yourself. See here. Set its PATH properly and make sure you can call ctags from command line.

Ripgrep

Ripgrep is fast greping tool available for both Linux, Windows and Mac. It is used by several searching plugins for Vim.

For Windows and Mac, you can install it via chocolatey and homebrew. For Linux, you can download from the release page and install it.

Linters

A linter is a tool to check your code for possible issues or errors. Based on your programming languages, you may need to install various linters.

Python: pylint and flake8.
Vim script: vint (You may need to install the pre-release versions because of this issue).

For other linters, please consult the linting plugin documentation. For Neomake (which is the linting plugin I currently use), a list of makers (i.e., linters) for different languages is listed here.

Terminal emulators

Which terminal emulator you are using can also affect the look of Neovim. Since Neovim support true colors, terminals which support true colors are recommended. For a list of terminals which support true colors, see here.

For Mac, you can use iterm2. If you connect to Linux server on Windows, I recommend wsltty and cygwin, both of them use mintty as the terminal emulator.

Font

Since Vim-airline uses several symbols not available in normal font, you need to install fonts here to make vim-airline look pretty. I am using Hack and it looks great.

Settings

Where to put the configuration file

On Windows, put it under $HOME/AppData/Local/nvim¹. On Linux and Mac, put it under ~/.config/nvim.

After that, when you first open nvim, all the plugins in this configuration will be installed automatically for you. Since I use quite a lot of plugins (more than 60), it may take a while for the installation process, depending on your network connection.

Trouble shooting

If you come across a issue, first you can use :checkhealth command provided by nvim to trouble-shoot yourself. Please read carefully the messages provided by health check.

If you still have an issue, you may open a new issue.

README.md

Introduction