kickstart.nvim

This repository is my personal fork of kickstart.nvim, an amazing starting point to write a custom Neovim configuration. It contains my entire configuration for Neovim, which has become my main text and code editor. Given some efforts to configure it and get the hang of it, Neovim comes with all the features of modern IDEs (e.g. language server, debugger, AI integration, etc.), while being very powerful, light-weight, almost infinitly customizable, super community-driven with a huge plugin eco-system, and living in the terminal, meaning it can be installed and used directly on remote machines. All these aspects make coding with Neovim really much more enjoyable for me, compared to my previous experiences with IDEs.

Requirements

• Neovim, obviously

• git, to clone this repository

• (optional but highly recommended) fd and ripgrep to search files, directories, or within files

• (optional) npm and Python, especially to install external tools managed with mason.nvim, like language servers, formatters, debuggers, etc.

• (optional) a valid GitHub Copilot subscription, for AI-assisted auto-completion and chat

Install Neovim

There are a few possibilities to install Neovim, depending on your operating system and your constraints.

On MacOS

On MacOS, if you simply want to install the latest version (which should be fine for most), you can simply use Homebrew. However, I prefer to have complete control over the version I use, as it happens that new versions have undesirable behaviors, so I install it from source.

With Homebrew

# to install the latest stable version:
brew install neovim
# or, to install the nightly version (with the latest features but less stable):
# brew install --HEAD neovim

From source

Download the appropriate Neovim release asset (nvim-macos-x86_64.tar.gz in my case) from the Neovim release page, cd in the download location, and run the following commands:

xattr -c ./nvim-macos-x86_64.tar.gz
tar xzvf nvim-macos-x86_64.tar.gz

Then, create a symbolic link from nvim somewhere in your $PATH to the ./nvim-macos-x86_64/bin/nvim executable. For instance, for Neovim version x.y.x, I typically run:

mv nvim-macos-x86_64 ~/.local/nvim-macos-x86_64-x_y_z
ln -sf ~/.local/nvim-macos-x86_64-x_y_z/bin/nvim ~/.local/bin/nvim

On Linux

With snapd (preferred)

sudo apt install snapd
sudo snap install nvim --classic
# sudo apt install build-essential # If neovim complains that gcc compiler is missing

With apt

# to install the nightly version (with the latest features but less stable):
add-apt-repository ppa:neovim-ppa/unstable # For very latest development version
# add-apt-repository ppa:neovim-ppa/stable # For stable but quite old version
apt update
apt install neovim

Install this configuration

Backup existing custom configuration

If you already have used Neovim with a custom configuration previously, you might want to back-up this existing configuration and delete Neovim's temporary files, with the following commands for instance:

mv ~/.config/nvim ~/.config/nvim-old
rm -rf ~/.local/share/nvim

Clone this configuration

After having managed any existing Neovim configuration, clone this repository in the Neovim configuration repository, with:

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/cjumel/kickstart.nvim ~/.config/nvim

Open Neovim with the install command

Then, open Neovim with the following install command, which is required only for the first launch:

NVIM_ENABLE_ALL_PLUGINS=1 nvim +MasonInstallAll

This will open Neovim, and the Neovim plugin manager I use, lazy.nvim, will automatically install all the required Neovim plugins. Then, the nvim-treesitter plugin will install language parsers for Treesitter, an essential tool providing a variety of language-specific features, like synthax highlighting or folding, and the mason.nvim plugin will install all the required language servers, formatters, linters and debuggers.

When notifications stop appearing, this is over and you can quit Neovim by typing the q key twice, to quite the lazy.nvim menu and Neovim succcessively.

Optionally, you can also setup the GitHub Copilot plugin if you have a valid subscription. To do so, create a .nvim.global.lua file with the following content:

vim.g.enable_gh_copilot_plugins = true

Then re-open Neovim and run the Copilot auth command to authenticate with GitHub (this will also download the Copilot LSP binary).

You're done

Then, you're done and you can use Neovim with this custom configuration with the regular command:

nvim

Additional configuration

Additional global or project-level configuration can be achieved with the .nvim-global.lua file and with project-local .nvim.lua files. Available options can be seen in the .nvim-global-example.lua and .nvim-example.lua files.

Clean Neovim data

To clean Neovim data, for instance in order to use a fresh install or test a different Neovim configuration without the risk of interference, you can run the following commands.

rm -rf ~/.local/share/nvim/
rm -rf ~/.local/state/nvim/

I try to avoid saving any important data to those directories (e.g. I save scratch files, which I don't want to see deleted blindly, in a different directory) so this should be a safe operations.