Neovim Config

I remember when I initially tried Neovim a few years ago, I was mostly focused on rewriting my existing Vim configuration from Vimscript to Lua.

I ended up splitting parts of my config up into separate folders and lua files.

I separated my user configurations from plugin configuration like this:

~/.config/nvim/lua/
├── config
│   ├── keymaps.lua
│   ├── lazy.lua
│   ├── local.lua
│   ├── platform_specific.lua
│   └── settings.lua
└── plugin-config
    ├── cmp.lua
    ├── colorscheme.lua
    ├── fzf.lua
    ├── gitsigns.lua
    ├── init.lua
    ├── lsp.lua
    ├── nvim-treesitter.lua
    ├── oil.lua
    └── vim-fugitive.lua

3 directories, 14 files

• The files in config/ are required from my init.lua
• plugin-config/init.lua is required from my init.lua
• The files in plugin-config/ are required from plugin-config/init.lua

Overall, this is a much cleaner way than a single file that is 100 or possibly 1000s of lines long. It also ensures each plugin has its own configuration file, which I really prefer.

Thoughts on Neovim

The main things that attract me to Neovim (over vanilla vim) are:

1. More sane defaults compared to Vim/Emacs
2. More structured/flexible configuration (feelings for Lua aside)
3. Better support for LSP integration

Of course, after using Emacs for a few weeks/months, I now see how Neovim is taking the Emacs philosophy of integrating every tool into the editor. This can be a good thing if you are fully invested into the editor, the Neovim community is strong afterall, however it does lead to much of the same functionality being re-invented.

This goes for functionality that is builtin to GUIs (image viewing) as well as fuzzy finding (shell), but that is a much broader topic than just Neovim and it runs into what terminals are capable of in 2025.

Plugin Managers

One source of churn has been the (neo)vim plugin manager. In Vim, I still use vim-plug for convenience and in Neovim, I use lazy.nvim.

One recent development that has me excited for the future of Neovim is the inclusion of a built-in package manager (vim.pack) coming in Neovim version 0.12.

It has always been a minor annoyance that various package manager solutions exist for (neo)vim and they all have to be bootstrapped.

Having a built-in package manager is a good move for plugin authors and users going forward.

Of course the ability to use other package managers (or clone repos with a script) will remain, but this proves that Neovim devs are paying attention to what the community wants, which is good.

If you are interested in my Neovim config, check it out here on Github.

Thanks for reading, and happy configuring!