Nvim v0.5 is the development branch of neovim and has been in constant feature update. Some of the major features include (but still in development):
- built-in Language Server Client (aka nvim-lsp)
- treesitter (used for syntax highlighting - and a bit of syntax check, but a topic for another day perhaps)
-
init.lua
as a substitute config file instead ofinit.vim
(Also coming soon in a future post)
You can have a look at their roadmap here to see what else is in development.
But today, my focus will be on installing nightly (or v0.5, but for this post I will refer to as nightly) alongside your stable version.
Why two different versions and not just update to nightly?
It's true you can just update to the nightly version and it will still work with your current config and go about your day. But, for someone like me who uses vim at work, I want to keep a stable version separate to the nightly where I may encounter breaking changes.
I also want to try out the features from nightly and mess around but rather keep those separate to my stable config.
If you also use vim at work but also want to experiment with the new features from nightly, then read on. Else you would most likely not care about the majority of this post, but feel free to read 🙂.
Requirements
Couple resources and tools you may need before we get started will be listed here:
Tools:
We will also make heavy use of the Build section of the neovim wiki resource:
Clone and Build
Once you have git and the build pre-requisites installed, we can continue and clone the neovim repo into your machine. These instructions are mostly for linux but they are similar for a Mac and for Windows (if you use WSL). My default directory will be the $HOME
directory. So let's clone and cd
into it.
git clone https://github.com/neovim/neovim.git $HOME/neovim
cd $HOME/neovim
Next we compile the source, let's keep it a Release
type because our focus is using neovim and not developing it:
make CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
Depending on your machine, this may take anywhere from 30 seconds to an hour or two. But eventually, if all goes well you should get no error messages and be able to see the executable at build/bin
.
Setup
Now we can also install the binary in a location of choice (by running make CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/path/to/location install
, but I would prefer to just leave the binary at build/bin/nvim
and work from there. The downside is that we will need to provide the runtime explicitly, so we run:
VIMRUNTIME=runtime ./build/bin/nvim
Congratulations! You got vim successfully compiled and running 🎉🥳🎉
At this point you are done. But writing the above line every time you want to open nightly is quite a hassle, especially when you want to open from your project directory but the runtime directory is not relative to your project, so you will have to explicitly include the full path to the runtime and the neovim binary.
A better way, would be to create a script file and call that instead. So let's make one!
touch $HOME/.local/bin/nv.sh
chmod u+x $HOME/.local/bin/nv.sh
A quick note, it is convention that when making script file you create it with the
.sh
extension, but you can omit that and just use the script name (likenv
instead ofnv.sh
).
Now inside nv.sh
:
# nv.sh
VIMRUNTIME=$HOME/neovim/runtime $HOME/neovim/build/bin/nvim
Assuming that $HOME/.local/bin
is in your $PATH
environment, calling nv.sh
anywhere from your terminal should open neovim nightly.
Config
Add your config at $HOME/.config/nvim/init.vim
and have two separate configs for stable and nightly.
" init.vim
let $NVIM_CONFIG_DIR = expand('$HOME/.config/nvim')
if has('nvim-0.5')
" nightly config
source $NVIM_CONFIG_DIR/nightly.vim
else
" stable config
source $NVIM_CONFIG_DIR/stable.vim
endif
Then you can have a stable.vim
for your stable config and then nightly.vim
for your nightly config.
However, we can take this a step further and separate them in different directories. So you can have a stable config at $HOME/.config/nvim
and have your nightly config at $HOME/.config/nvim-nightly
. While this works, there are a couple more tweaks you will have to do in order for it to work properly. If you are interested in this method then I would recommend you to read the next section, otherwise just jump to updating neovim nightly further below 😜.
Separate directory for stable and nightly (OPTIONAL)
Now everything from here onward is optional for you to do. The reason why I did this is because I had issues with loading remote plugins (plugins with rplugin
directory) where it would over-write the rplugin.vim
manifest, if I switch between stable and nightly. This was due to me having different plugins for the two versions.
The solution was to keep them in separate directory so there are no namespace clashes. So we should have the following directory structure for stable (nvim
) and nightly (nvim-nightly
).
$HOME/.config/
├── nvim
│ └── init.vim
├── nvim-nightly
│ └── init.vim
The same for the local directory:
$HOME/.local/share/
├── nvim
│ ├── site/
│ └── rplugin.vim
├── nvim-nightly
│ ├── site/
│ └── rplugin.vim
Update nv.sh
Since nvim/init.vim
is the file neovim looks for as the default config, we need to explicitly mention the config file we want loaded for nightly. And we also want to specify where remote plugins manifest will be placed.
# nv.sh
NVIM_RPLUGIN_MANIFEST=$HOME/.local/share/nvim-nightly/rplugin.vim VIMRUNTIME=$HOME/neovim/runtime $HOME/neovim/build/bin/nvim "$@" -u $HOME/.config/nvim-nightly/init.vim
Edit: Added the
$@
after the nvim executable. I've noticed that if you pass a file name to the script it will not load it. We want to be able pass down any number of arguments from the script to the executable.
Add custom paths to runtimepath
Finally, we need to specify our config and local directory to be part of the runtimepath
, else it will end up not picking plugins installed via a plugin manager. So within the config file, we want to remove all instances where we don't want runtimepath
to search for and explicitly add our own custom path.
" $HOME/.config/nvim-nightly/init.vim
set runtimepath-=~/.config/nvim
set runtimepath-=~/.config/nvim/after
set runtimepath-=~/.local/share/nvim/site
set runtimepath-=~/.local/share/nvim/site/after
set runtimepath+=~/.config/nvim-nightly/after
set runtimepath^=~/.config/nvim-nightly
set runtimepath+=~/.local/share/nvim-nightly/site/after
set runtimepath^=~/.local/share/nvim-nightly/site
Add custom paths to packpath
if using minpac or similar plugin manager
If you are using the native package handler, or using a plugin manager that utilizes the build-in package handling in vim like minpac. Then you may have to specify the custom path to your local directory.
" $HOME/.config/nvim-nightly/init.vim
set packpath-=~/.config/nvim
set packpath-=~/.config/nvim/after
set packpath-=~/.local/share/nvim/site
set packpath-=~/.local/share/nvim/site/after
set packpath^=~/.config/nvim-nightly
set packpath+=~/.config/nvim-nightly/after
set packpath^=~/.local/share/nvim-nightly/site
set packpath+=~/.local/share/nvim-nightly/site/after
Update neovim nightly
To update neovim, it's as easy as pulling all the latest changes to your local machine and doing a clean compile.
cd $HOME/neovim
git pull
make distclean && make CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
Conclusion
I hope this guide helps you in setting up neovim nightly alongside the stable version, or at least to helps me reference in-case I forget. It is one of many ways of getting them installed in a machine, but this is the way I preferred on getting it installed.
Troubleshooting
E149: Sorry, no help for ...
If you have problems accessing docs, since it was compiled from source you will have to manually generate docs. Fortunately, this can be done just once by running the vim ex command:
:helptags $VIMRUNTIME/doc
$MYVIMRC
is empty
Some might use :e $MYVIMRC
to open their config file, and because we are using different directory for configs, you may have to include MYVIMRC
variable in nv.sh
.
# nv.sh
MYVIMRC=$HOME/.config/nvim-nightly/init.vim NVIM_RPLUGIN_MANIFEST=$HOME/.local/share/nvim-nightly/rplugin.vim VIMRUNTIME=$HOME/neovim/runtime $HOME/neovim/build/bin/nvim "$@" -u $HOME/.config/nvim-nightly/init.vim
packer.nvim uses default nvim directory and not the separate ~/.config/nvim-nightly
and ~/.local/share/nvim-nightly
directory
If you followed the guide that separates the directories and use packer plugin manager for nvim nightly then you may want to add packer.init()
before your packer.startup()
and specify the nvim-nightly
directory instead of the default directory. You can use my plugins file as an example. Below is a snippet of it:
require 'packer'.init {
package_root = os.getenv('HOME') .. '/.local/share/nvim-nightly/site/pack',
compile_path = os.getenv('HOME') .. '/.config/nvim-nightly/plugin/packer_compiled.vim'
}
require 'packer'.startup(function(use)
-- plugins
end)
Top comments (10)
Thank you, this is helpful! I found this after giving up on having two separate installations but was still struggling to use two separate config and data directories for an older setup with init.vim and a newer setup with init.lua. I could get everything to work except that I couldn't get paq-nvim to install packages anywhere but
~/.local/share/nvim
, when I wanted it to install them in~/.local/share/nvim-lua
(it's less configurable than packer and only refers to stdpath("data")).What I ended up doing was the following:
~/.local/share-nvim
nvim-lua
data directory in~/.local/share
to~/.local/share-nvim
asnvim
nvim.paq
that opens nvim withinit.lua
and sets the data directory to~/.local/share-nvim
(by setting theXDG_DATA_HOME
env variable) and only installing/updating packages with this instance of nvimnvim.lua
that uses theinit.lua
config but doesn't changeXDG_DATA_HOME
It's very hacky, but with the above, and with runtimepath and packpath settings based on what you suggest above, I can get Paq to install packages to
~/.local/share/nvim-lua
indirectly via the symlink and get nvim to use those packages. I would just always setXDG_DATA_HOME
to the special data directory when I want to use init.lua, but I get some weird issues compiling TeX documents whenXDG_DATA_HOME
is changed.Hey!
This is nice! But a bit overly complicated, and I guess that's one of the limitations of keeping separately namespaced nvim configs that would lead to doing the hacky way you provided. Don't get me wrong that's a nice implementation 🙂
Although here is something you can try with paq-nvim if you have the time. I've checked through paq-nvim docs and, while a bit obscure, there is a way to change where to install the plugins, and that is thru the
setup()
function.Make sure you git clone paq-nvim to the correct directory that was set in your
packpaths
, following your folder convention:Before you provide your plugins within paq, you need to call the setup function and provide the path there, following your folder convention:
I have not tried this myself so do let me know if this helps out or not with keeping your configs separate with different directories.
Pretty useful
This was my vim alias: `alias vim='VIMRUNTIME=$HOME/neovim/runtime $HOME/neovim/build/bin/nvim'
Some extra steps, in my case:
In Mac:
I had to brew install cmake and automake
Then, In Ubuntu:
apt-get install automake libtool libtool-bin gettext
This is awesome! I forgot you could make an alias as well, the reason I kept it as a sh file was because I was leading up to separating your stable neovim config from nightly neovim config, so I just stuck to that lol
As for your extra steps, was that not detailed in the neovim wiki that was provided in the post? github.com/neovim/neovim/wiki/Buil...
If not you could help contribute to their wiki in case some users might also have to install the same packages.
This is a great post thank you so much for sharing, I really wanted to check out 0.5 but I could not risk messing up my setup!
just a note: in the
init.vim
there is a missing endif at the end, without it neovim will throw an errorshould be
Thanks again!
Thanks for that, I've updated the post 😅
Thanks for making the post
github.com/iledarn/nix-neovim
Thx! I did wrap the solution in Nix. So I can install all with one command -
nix-shell
and it wouldn't conflict with my existing Neovim.When I try to run the stable version of nvim I get an error 'E484 Can't open file ~/.config/nvim/stable.vim' . I am not sure what is causing it and was wondering if someone could help?
Hey, so this article was written a long long time ago and neovim has changed a lot of stuff since then. If you want to keep two separate I would suggest to look at NVIM_APPNAME (neovim.io/doc/user/starting.html#%...) and this article has a good guide on how to use it: michaeluloth.com/neovim-switch-con...
That being said, my guess for your problem where the file can't be opened is probably because you haven't specified the proper path.
Maybe try expanding the path with
expand('~/.config/nvim/stable.vim')
or usestdpath('config') . '/stable.vim'