viminal2/README.md

# viminal2

This is my Neovim configuration, written in [Fennel](https://fennel-lang.org/),
a Lisp that transpiles to Lua. This allows me to continue Vimming while
masquerading as an Emacs lisper, walking the fine line between the light and
dark sides of text editing.

## Fennel

Originally I wrote this configuration in Lua but I decided to switch to Fennel
in order to make it even more esoteric to the average software developer. I
hand-wrote a few parts, and migrated all the existing code using
[antifennel](https://git.sr.ht/~technomancy/antifennel).

Fennel is a Lisp, so you see a lot of S-expressions. It looks really disgusting
at first, but once you grasp the true naked structure of Lisp code, you begin
to understand that it's the most powerful language God ever wrought.

![xkcd 297, lisp cycles](https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/lisp_cycles.png)

Here is a snippet from `init.fnl`:

```fennel
(vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd [:VimResized]
                             {:callback (fn []
                                          (local current-tab
                                                 (vim.api.nvim_get_current_tabpage))
                                          (vim.cmd "tabdo wincmd =")
                                          (vim.api.nvim_set_current_tabpage current-tab))
                              :desc "Resize splits with terminal window"
                              :group (vim.api.nvim_create_augroup :EqualizeSplits
                                                                  {})})
```

## Nix

This configuration is built around the Nix package manager. In fact it is my
second attempt to do so. The [first](https://github.com/youwen5/viminal) was
configured using [Nixvim](https://github.com/nix-community/nixvim). This mostly
worked, except you often had to escape into raw Lua strings to get precise
customization.

Enter [nixCats](https://github.com/BirdeeHub/nixCats-nvim). It provides the
tools needed to mix Nix and Lua in your configurations. For advanced users,
configuring Neovim with Nix expressions doesn't really make sense, since the
whole point of Neovim is to be extremely hackable ("hyperextensible") and it
provides ergonomic Lua bindings for that purpose.

This setup provides not just a usable but a "great" Neovim configuration for
NixOS. That is, it has features that make it _better_ on _all distros_, not
just on NixOS. Why? Instead of using ad-hoc package managers written for Neovim
like `lazy.nvim`, `Mason`, etc, all external dependencies are fetched and built
by Nix. Mason and lazy are good for what they are meant for, but Nix can make
strong guarantees that practically no other package management tool can,
period. Namely, it can ensure the presence of runtime dependencies (like `rg`,
`fd`, LSPs, formatters, etc), and guarantee builds are successful. If your
editor works today, it'll work tomorrow. It won't break from system upgrades or
files randomly getting broken. Nix is purpose built to handle pretty much
everything that a text editor's plugins shouldn't, and it's a perfect match.

## Try it

You can test drive the configuration (even if you aren't on NixOS) if you have
the Nix package manager available (with flakes).

```bash nix run 'github:youwen5/viminal2' ```

## Design

As this is my second configuration from scratch (if you count Nixvim as "from
scratch"), I wanted to do it right (so I could stop wasting my time configuring
my editor).

For completion, I use [blink.cmp](https://github.com/Saghen/blink.cmp). This
plugin is much, much faster than `nvim-cmp` thanks to optimized `SIMD`
instructions (and Rust), has a better fuzzy search, and comes with more out of
the box.

`lz.n` is used to load plugins after they have been downloaded by Nix. `lz.n`
is a lazy loading plugin by the authors of `Rocks.nvim`, a plugin manager based
on Luarocks. As they are designed to be decoupled, `Rocks.nvim` can simply be
replaced by Nix. Most plugins are lazy loaded, but generally performance is
good enough that it is not even strictly necessary.

The keybinds have gotten a lot more idiosyncratic. Instead of focusing on
mnemonic keys that can be easily committed to memory, highly efficient ones
were chosen instead.

## Todo

- Try rewriting config in Fennel.

## License

Feel free to copy any code from here or use it as an example. It's [public
domain](./LICENSE).