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Pre-requisite

There are a few dependencies if we want to use Nvim for efficient editing and development work.

Python

A lot of Nvim 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 you can run python --version, and that the output should be Python 3.x.

Pynvim

Nvim relies on pynvim to communicate with plugins that utilize its Python binding. Pynvim is required by plugins such as Semshi.

pip install -U pynvim

python-lsp-server

python-lsp-server is the community-fork of pyls, and it is a Python Language Server for completion, linting, go to definition, etc.

pip install 'python-lsp-server[all]' pylsp-mypy pyls-isort

Node

We need to install node.js from here:

# Ref: https://johnpapa.net/node-and-npm-without-sudo/
wget https://nodejs.org/dist/v14.15.4/node-v14.15.4-linux-x64.tar.xz

mkdir -p $HOME/tools
# extract node to a custom directory, the directory should exist.
tar xvf node-v14.15.4-linux-x64.tar.xz --directory=$HOME/tools

Then add the following config to .bash_profile or .zshrc

export PATH="$HOME/tools/node-v14.15.4-linux-x64/bin:$PATH"

Source the file:

source ~/.bash_profile
# source ~/.zshrc

vim-language-server

vim-language-server provides completion for vim script. We can install vim-language-server globally and set its path:

npm install -g vim-language-server

export PATH="$HOME/.npm-packages/bin:$PATH"

Git

Git is used by the plugin manager packer.nvim to clone plugins from GitHub or other Git repositories.

Since Git is usually pre-installed on Linux and macOS, 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 vista.vim, we need to install a ctags distribution. Universal-ctags is preferred.

To install ctags on macOS, use Homebrew:

brew install ctags

To install it Windows, use chocolatey or scoop

choco install universal-ctags

# scoop bucket add extras
# scoop install univeral-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 grepping tool available for both Linux, Windows and macOS. It is used by several searching plugins.

For Windows and macOS, 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.

Terminal emulators

Which terminal emulator we choose to use greatly affects the appearance and functionalities of Nvim. Since Nvim supports true colors, terminals that support true colors are preferred. For a list of terminals that support true colors, see here.

For macOS, we can use kitty, iterm2, or Alacritty. If you connect to Linux server on Windows, I recommend wsltty and Cygwin, both of them use mintty as the terminal emulator.

For the latest version of Windows 10, you can also try the new Windows Terminal.

Font

Since statusline or file explorer plugins often use Unicode symbols not available in normal font, we need to install a patched font from the nerd-fonts project.

Install Nvim

There are various ways to install Nvim depending on your system. Current configuration is tested against nvim v0.6.0.

Linux

We can directly download the binary release from here.

Windows

The easiest way to install Nvim on Windows is via chocolatey:

choco install neovim

You may download from nvim release from GitHub and manually extract it.

macOS

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

brew install neovim

After installing Nvim, we need to add the directory where the Nvim executable (nvim on Linux and macOS, 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

Install plugin manager packer.nvim

I use packer.nvim to manage my plugins. We need to install packer.nvim on our system first.

For Windows, if curl is installed, use the following command (on PowerShell):

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/wbthomason/packer.nvim "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\nvim-data\site\pack\packer\opt\packer.nvim"

For macOS and Linux, use the following command:

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/wbthomason/packer.nvim ~/.local/share/nvim/site/pack/packer/opt/packer.nvim

How to install this configuration

On Windows, the config directory is $HOME/AppData/Local/nvim1. On Linux and macOS, the directory is ~/.config/nvim. First, we need to remove all the files under the config directory (including dot files), then go to this directory, and run the following command to install this configuration:

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/jdhao/nvim-config.git .

After that, when we first open nvim, run command :PackerSync to install all the plugins and generate packer_compiled.lua. Since I use quite a lot of plugins (more than 60), it may take some time to install all of them, depending on your network condition.

Automatic installation

Automatic Installation for Linux

To set up a workable Nvim environment on Linux, I use this bash script to automatically install necessary dependencies, Nvim 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.

Automatic installation for Windows

Run script nvim_setup_windows.ps1 under PowerShell.

Footnotes

  1. Use echo %userprofile% to see where your $HOME is. ↩