viminal

This is the Neovim configuration for all my NixOS and Nix enabled systems (including macOS). It aims to be minimal and utilitarian; it forgoes many blingful features like sidebars or fancy UI enhancements in favor of native (neo)Vim, while still having everything useful you'd expect, like LSPs, file explorer (oil.nvim), completions, advanced language tools, and QoL enhancements.

The central design goal is to prefer Vim whenever possible. The Vim text editor is already incredibly powerful, and many plugins designed to emulate features from more bloated editors like VS Code can already be accomplished in native Vim. To that end, plugins were selected to unobtrusively integrate with Vim. For instance, oil.nvim allows you to interface with your filesystem through a regular Vim buffer, and Git integration is done by Gitsigns and Neogit, which enable a similar interface for Git. The long-term benefit of this is avoiding lock-in to a plugin that encourages a heavily idiosyncratic workflow which may become unmaintained in the future, while the Neovim core itself is almost assuredly going stick around.

It uses the Nixvim project under the hood to declaratively configure Neovim and its plugins, and installs tools needed by it (like ripgrep, fd, etc). However, LSPs are not installed or handled by the plugin. The user is expected to provide their own LSPs in the $PATH, but since they are using Nix, this is trivial.

The flake simply provides a package that contains the binaries nvim, vim, and vi. It can be called just like the regular nvim binary (vim and vi are just symlinks to nvim), except it bundles all of my custom configuration and their dependencies with the power of Nix. Plugins are managed by Nix. An entirely self-contained, reproducible, purely functional text editor. Amazing.

All plugins are precompiled to Lua bytecode by Luajit when the package is built for maximum speed and efficiency. When possible, plugins are also combined for a massive efficiency boost. This allows startup times as fast as lazy loading without all of the hassle.

Feel free to fork or copy the config to use yourself. It's free in the public domain.

Thanks to this gist for showing me how to build a Nixvim configuration as a standalone Nix package.

Usage

You can test drive my config in just one line (if you have Nix, of course):

nix run 'github:youwen5/viminal' --extra-experimental-features flakes --extra-experimental-features nix-command

If for some reason, you want to install it permanently, add it to your flake inputs, and install the package in the usual way:

# flake.nix
{
  description = "Your system configuration flake.";

  inputs = {
    # -- snip --
    viminal.url = "github:youwen5/viminal";
  };
    # -- snip --
  };
  # -- snip --
}

# Wherever you install packages for your system or user:

{inputs, system, ...}:
{
  environment.systemPackages = [
    inputs.viminal.packages.${system}.default
    # supported systems: x86_64-linux, aarch64-linux, x86_64-darwin, aarch64-darwin
  ];
}

Warning

This package will add the symlinks vim -> nvim and vi -> nvim so it will conflict with pkgs.vim and any programs installing binaries called vim or vi. You must remove existing Neovim and Vim packages to install this.