I’ve been using neovim for a while now, but only recently do I think I’ve unlocked the true power of the editor, making your own plugins.
The Problem
When you install neovim, there will probably be a plugin for most issues you come across, but what if there isn’t? The beauty of NOT using VS Code or a preconfigured IDE is the ability to get your development environment to be exactly how you like, whether that would be to make it “fit like a glove” or “good enough”.
You could ask on a forum like reddit or find a similar plugin, but there’s no guarantee what you’re looking for is actually out there. With a normal editor, you’d probably have to stop there or learn how to make plugins for that ecosystem (Best of luck if you use IntelliJ), but the nature of neovim is that you’re already so close to the plugin ecosystem, as neovim configurations are mostly written in lua.
If you’re familiar with coding and you’ve been writing your config for a while, it’ll be a breeze to learn. With lua-language-server and neodev.nvim you can get the neovim api, documented, at your fingertips, in minutes.
My Experience
Once you’re familiar with the api, it’s incredibly easy to turn your ideas into plugins, or solve your problems.
Feel like you’re accidentally closing splits too ofen and wish you could have
similar to ctrl+shift+t in a browser? In 30mins to 1hr you could have a functioning
plugin. I wrote whoops.nvim which
solved this for me! The beauty of it being so quick to write was that when
I realised I didn’t actually need it, I could delete it instantly, knowing
that there was no suffering involved that would justify me keeping it around.
And with the magic of GitHub, I can keep it around until someone else requests
it on Reddit, where they will inevitably realise it’s useless and move on
with their life too.
A good example…
Let’s talk about a plugin I made that I use almost every day, monorepo.nvim.
While working on monorepos with 4 node projects that do the same thing, I found
it hard to figure out which one I was working in when using telescope’s find_files().
It also became hard to use other plugins like harpoon to jump around, since I had
the same “save” for the whole monorepo. I looked at a few plugins for changing
the scope of nvim but found none that I liked, so I decided to make my own.
The plugin interfaces with telescope for picking the sub-project, as well as using
plenary to persist the information at a project basis. It’s basically a glorified :cd machine,
but damn if it isn’t useful. Oh, and it was fun to make too!
Anyway, if you haven’t already, I encourage you to try making your own plugins or just simply interacting with the nvim API more inside your own config, even if it’s just a small little script, it’ll make you fall in love with neovim even more.