Pre-requisite
There are a few dependencies if we want to use Neovim for efficient editing and development work.
Python
A lot of Neovim plugins are mainly written in Python. To use auto-completion
and other features, we must install Python 3. The easiest way to install is via
Anaconda or
Miniconda. Make sure that the
output of python --version on the command line shows that Python 3.x is
installed.
Pynvim
Neovim relies on pynvim to communicate with plugins that utilize its Python binding. Pynvim is required by plugins such as Deoplete and Semshi.
Jedi
For Python code auto-completion to work, we need to install Jedi:
pip install jedi
Git
Git is used by the plugin manager vim-plug to download plugins from GitHub or other Git repositories.
Since Git is usually pre-installed on Linux and Mac, we do not need to worry
if we are on these two platforms. For Windows, install Git for
Windows and make sure you can call git
from the command line.
ctags
In order to use tags related plugins such as tagbar and gutentags, we 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, we need to build it from source. See here for the details.
Set its PATH properly and make sure you can call ctags from command line.
Ripgrep
Ripgrep, aka, rg, is a fast grep
tool available for both Linux, Windows and Mac. It is used by several searching
plugins.
For Windows and Mac, we can install it via chocolatey and homebrew respectively. For Linux, we can download the executable file from its release page and install it.
Linters
A linter is a tool to check the source code for possible style and syntax issues. Based on the programming languages we use, we 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 plugin documentation. For ALE(https://github.com/dense-analysis/ale) (which is the linting plugin I currently use), a list of linters for different languages is listed here.
Terminal emulators
Which terminal emulator we choose to use greatly affects the appearance and functionalities of Neovim. Since Neovim supports true colors, terminals that support true colors are preferred. For a list of terminals that support true colors, see here.
For Mac, we can use iterm2, kitty or Alacritty. 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, we need to install fonts here to make vim-airline look pretty. I am using Hack, and it looks great. Another great resource for programming font is the nerd-font project.
Install Neovim
There are various ways to install Neovim based on your system.
Linux
Follow the official guide and download the appimage from the release page.
For some Linux systems, we may not be able to run the appimage. We can directly download the binary release from here and extract it to run Neovim.
Windows
The easiest way to install Neovim on Windows is via chocolatey. First, install chocolatey. Then we can install neovim easily with
# install the latest version of neovim
# choco install neovim --pre
choco install neovim
The Neovim that chocolatey installs may not be up to date. To use the cutting-edge features of Neovim, you may download the nightly release from GitHub and manually extract it.
Mac
It is recommended to install neovim via Homebrew on macOS. Simply run the following command:
brew install neovim
# If you want to install the latest version of neovim, use the following
# command instead.
# brew install --HEAD neovim
After installing Neovim, we need to add the directory where the Neovim
executable (nvim on Linux and Mac, nvim.exe on Windows) resides to the
system PATH.
Make sure that you can call nvim from the command line after all these setups.
Setting up Nvim
How to install this configuration
On Windows, the config directory is $HOME/AppData/Local/nvim1. On Linux
and Mac, the directory is ~/.config/nvim. First, we need to remove all the
files under the config directory (including dot files), then use the following
command to install this configuration:
git clone https://github.com/jdhao/nvim-config.git .
After that, when we first open nvim, all the plugins included in this configuration will be installed automatically for you (for Windows and Mac). Since I use quite a lot of plugins (around 60 plugins), it may take some time to install all of them, depending on your network condition.
Automatic Installation
To set up a workable Neovim environment in Linux, I use the script
Nvim_setup.sh to automatically install necessary
dependencies, Neovim itself and Nvim configs in this repo.
Note that the variable PYTHON_INSTALLED, SYSTEM_PYTHON and
ADD_TO_SYSTEM_PATH in the script should be set properly based on your
environment.
-
Use
echo %userprofile%to see where your$HOMEis. ↩︎