This post is more for me than anyone else—a step-by-step guide to setting up my Neovim dotfiles just the way I like them. If you’re also looking to perfect your Neovim setup, feel free to take some hints from this. Consider it a peek into how I roll with Neovim

A Few Words Before You Start

Neovim, building a whole editor from scratch itself is an art. It’s personal and unique. And just like rome, its not built in a day. Don’t try to perfect it, iteratively improve it as you like.

Resources

  • Youtube Josean Martinez - Neovim Setup, he sets things up from scratch and explains the plugins he uses and the reasons behind it.
  • A colleague from Wadhwani AI, George Tom has an amazing setup for Neovim, he really mastered this art, took some inspiration from his setup. (if you are an advanced user, you can directly go to his setup for better ideas)

Setup

  • STOW

    • Neovim can go a long way in terms of customizations, and it’s a good idea to keep your dotfiles organized. I use stow to manage my dotfiles. It’s a simple tool that helps manage your dotfiles in a clean and organized way. You can install it using brew install stow on macOS.
    • For older systems you might need to install it from source. You can find the instructions here.
    • For non-sudo ensure you do ./configure --prefix=$HOME/.local and make install to install it in your home directory.

  • Neovim

    • Install Neovim using brew install neovim on macOS.
    • Use the above resources to set up your Neovim config file.

Things needing manual setup

  • Copy and Paste
    • set clipboard=unnamedplus - This will allow you to copy and paste from your system clipboard.
    • For SSH connections from neovim 10.0 onwards, you can use OSC 52 escape sequences to copy and paste from your system clipboard. You can find more about it here. Use official man to find more about it.

That’s all for the blog for now, will be adding more details whenever I get time.