neovim + Plug + addons

Tigersharke

BOfH in User's clothing
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I've known of neovim as a superior alternative to vim (cleaner codebase, less buggy etc) for a while but recently looked into how it can be extended and enhanced. First I installed Plug as a plugin (aka addon) manager, then I tried to get other things installed and to understand Plug itself as the manager of them. If you are NEW to neovim and never had vim or didn't create a vimrc file, then proper setup of neovim takes a little more work. I could not discover any config file already created or installed nor any example file on my system. Along with the config, you need to create a hierarchy of directories for the plugins you install. Once all of that is accomplished I could look for cool addons like syntax highlighters, language packs, and directory tree helpers. Plug was the more commonly mentioned manager mentioned with any of the addons and after a peek at a couple others ir also seems to be one of the easier ones to use. One addon I noticed that appears to be a boon to any git user is vim gitgutter, maybe it would have helped me when I was struggling to deal with git for PC-BSD documentation after it left the wiki. A helpful statusbar revision is what lightline.vim is about and has a number of variations and configurability.

Anyhow after all of this, I'm curious if anyone else has discovered such a tool as NeoVim?

I recently used it to peruse the exported xml files from the themes, but since my primary concern with those are the individual CSS files, I will likely split those out, but having them in one file together is helpful also. neovim is much like vim in that initially it is rather bright, mostly dark on white background though I did notice yellow on white background which is illegible at best, headache inducing at worst. So looked into how it can be themed, which awesomely it can and easily. Grab the addon neodark.vim and all will be much improved. The addon manager 'Plug' includes a good example init.vim file which is used as the config, or the vim wiki has another example, much the same.

The whole foray was due to seeing a best neovim plugins for software development webpage.

PS. A wrinkle, in FreeBSD ports, it is neovim and/or neovim-qt but the executable is nvim or nvim-qt.

BTW.. another amazing site which will greatly assist with discovering other plugins.

Very helpful commands/features are mentioned in the startup of nvim within an xterm but seem to be missing if started from a menu as nvim-qt:
  • :healthcheck
  • :help nvim
Also, it may suggest that you could install yarn OR npm but the healthcheck will still complain about npm, there might be a config to set for it to know to use yarn but I haven't checked.
 
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