VIM to NeoVIM

I never thought, the day will come! The story of VIM addiction and NeoVIM adoption.

In search of a code editor which is available everywhere, from Desktop to servers, I accidentally got used to vi some years back. I had to edit some files on the server or they call it Cloud, the only editor available there was vi. I just used it and forgot it as it was not even close to anything that modern code editors offer.

The thing came back to me, when I switch to Ubuntu as my daily work machine. Well still I do a lot with Sublime Text but this vi is just there. Before I knew, I started using it now and then.

I did not need a lot of plug-ins, just the text editor is enough for me for occasional editing. Slowly as I started using it more frequently, the only plugin I needed was a file tree. So the NERDTree is perfect for me till date.

Now there is NeoVIM, which is just VIM on the frontend. Which means for a VIM user there is no difference but the underlying development is changed completely. I resisted for 2 years but once I configured and used it, it seems just natural to be with it.

NeoVIM and Ubuntu

Like other things in Ubuntu, just download the binary bundle, extract into a folder, set the path in ~/.bashrc and ready to go with NeoVIM. Instead of vi one has to use nvim on commandline.

• Can be configured through init.vim or init.lua file. Not both at the same time.
• Location of these files are in $HOME/.config/nvim/
• This nvim folder have to be created manually
• Plug-ins are just github repositories. Just download and place it in pack folder inside $HOME/.config/nvim/ folder. Then add a require satement on the config file.

 require('lualine').setup()

• There are plugin managers and there are choices there also. However, for me this github repo download works fine.
• Here is a video explaining NeoVIM configuration