Nvim

I’ve recently seen quite a few of people on Mastodon asking for “recommended plugins” as they (re)discover nvim.

I don’t actually know why now. Maybe it’s like the new year’s resolution hitting late for many developers? Something along with getting back to work, full of vacations renewed hope?

Anyway, in this post I’ll try to sum up what I personally would want to find on every configuration. I know there are so-called nvim distribution like astro, lazy to name a few. But I feel like they’re too complex, complete and opinionated. I’d rather hand-pick from a list than have too much for my use cases.

Here we go!

First, there’s been this blog post by Dimitri Sabadie aka Phaazon. A very interesting reading. Notably given the fact he’s a plugin author but also the mind behind This Week in Neovim. The guy knows what he talks about. And his take is that nvim is getting too big, almost bloated already.

Then this Reddit post about both Phaazon’s write-up and a previous poll about moving features into nvim’s core. The author, u/premell states that having too many plugins leads to unstable setups. One plugin could bring breaking changes to its API. And other plugins relying on it could stop working as expected. As far as I understand, he thinks that some wildly used plugins should make their way to nvim’s core to guarantee stability and prosperity to others.

I’m not sure it’s the right way of doing things.

I somewhat recently got a new job. With that a new machine, brand new OS ready for customization. Along a pile of new attributed tasks and its load of meetings of course.

In this post, I write about what I changed in my workflow to better accommodate this changes. I’ll talk about minor nvim changes, alacritty hacks and a newly-discovered tmux feature and a quick feed back on my new favorite synchronization tool syncthing.

Let’s dive right in!

For quite some time now, I only used markdown for either note-taking or making revealjs(Fr) presentations. And this blog of course…

Anyway, while looking for my next employer, I recently had to produce a document and I wanted to use my usual tools: nvim to write markdown and compile it using pandoc. The thing is, my nvim configuration was kind of hard-coded for revealjs.

It was time for me to address this issue and have it work for every type of pandoc use case.