Neovim

Neovim is a vim fork with builtin lsp client, support for lua scripting, and retro compatibility with the old vimscript language

Language server protocol in neovim

It’s a standard protocol to manage interaction between code editors and process providing code completion and syntax highlighting

flowchart LR subgraph editors direction TB A[vim] B[nvim] C[vscode] end subgraph language_servers direction TB D[C] E[ansiblels] F[dockerls] end editors --send file content--> language_servers language_servers --code completition--> editors

Neovim provides integrated support as it feature a builtin LSP client, in my personal configuration this plugins are also enabled to improve the LSP management experience

mason for LSP installation
lspconfig for LSP configuration
mason-lspconfig for automatic LSP management

Add a language server

Language servers needs to be installed with mason and then activated with lspconfig then when the correspondent filetype is detected lspconfig will start the server and attach the client to it for the active buffer

:MasonInstall
:lua require("lspconfig").hyprls.setup{}

To check if a language server is running correctly run :LspInfo

lspconfig: require("lspconfig.health").check()

LSP configs active in this session (globally)
- Configured servers: lua_ls, ansiblels, gopls, pyright, bashls, terraformls, docker_compose_language_service, dockerls, eslint
- OK Deprecated servers: (none)

LSP configs active in this buffer (bufnr: 1)
- Language client log: ~/.local/state/nvim/lsp.log
- Detected filetype: yaml
- 0 client(s) attached to this buffer

Docs for active configs:

Setting filetype

In order to limit a language server to a specific set of files (e.g. ansiblels) configure lspconfig to run the LSP server on a specific filetype (ansible) and configure neovim to set the filetype for the specific set of file

-- in nvim filetypes configuration
vim.filetype.add({pattern = { [".*/playbooks/.*%.yml"] = "ansible" },})
vim.filetype.add({pattern = { [".*/playbooks/.*%.yaml"] = "ansible" },})
vim.filetype.add({pattern = { [".*/roles/.*%.yml"] = "ansible" },})
vim.filetype.add({pattern = { [".*/roles/.*%.yaml"] = "ansible" },})

-- in the lspconfig file
-------------------------------------
require('lspconfig').ansiblels.setup{
	filetypes ={"ansible"};
}
------------------------------------

The pattern objects requires a lua pattern as argument

Macros

Macros are a vim feature that allow to record and replay a commands, useful when making a single set of operations on a lot of lines or in multiple files with the same structure

To register a macro press q followed by the register where the macro will be stored for example e, then press the commands you want to record and then q again to stop registering

Macro visualize

To visualize a macro use the :reg command (macros are stored in vim registers)

:reg " shows content of all registers
:reg e " shows content of the `e` register

Macro replay

To replay a macro use @ in normal mode followed by the register name, for example @e, number of times can also be specified, for example 5@e, to replay a macro on all lines:

:%:normal @e

It will run the commands in the e register from normal mode on the all buffer %

Quick command reference

To add argument to the command line inside vim (e.g. to add file and also buffers)

" path expansion is allowed
:argadd [path/to/file/]

To run a specific command in all open buffers

" run find and replace
bufdo %s/\](assets\/pages\/\(.*\/Pasted.*\))/](assets\/\1)/gc | update |bw

" indent
bufdo execute "normal! ggvG=l" | update |bw

replace visually highlighted text without overwrite content inside default register

v
"  highlight text
yv
"  highlight text to overwrite
P

To filter content in a file based on a grep expression:

:%!grep baas

Implement New functions

To Extend neovim functionality new lua function can be added as commands to run from command mode with the following function

  vim.api.nvim_create_user_command('Hugo', function(opts) run_hugo_command(opts.fargs) end, { nargs = '*', complete = hugo_complete_arglead, })

The function accepts a lambda that implements the command logic

Write content in the buffer

To write content into the buffer use the vim.api.nvim_buf_set_text() function (see :help nvim_buf_set_text for details) for example:

local row, col = unpack(vim.api.nvim_win_get_cursor(0))
vim.api.nvim_buf_set_text(0, row - 1, col, row - 1, col, { "new op line!" })