My Neovim Configuration

1. Keep Neovim updated as much as possible, either:

   • through official releases preferrably (binaries), OR
   • directly from local source, updated with upstream changes periodically, AND
   • avoid Debian/downstream packages - they tend to be outdated.

2. Keep things manageable (preferably, < 500 lines).

3. Document settings as much as possible, especially niche ones.

4. Do not make leader key something you use a lot in insert mode.

5. Avoid defaults (:help nvim-defaults or https://neovim.io/doc/user/vim_diff.html)

6. Prefer Neovim's (often improved) settings/plugins to their older Vim counterparts.

[OLD] Installing the latest version of Neovim (on Linux)

Neovim's newer versions come integrated with cool features (namely: treesitter and LSP) that might be of interest to you as a programmer. There might also be compatibility issues with plugins especially if they rely on the integration features introduced in newer versions which is why they won't work on older versions. Being on a distro like Ubuntu or Mint probably means that you are stuck on an older version. You can update Nvim by either:

• Adding the Neovim PPA, updating your repositories and then installing from the command line. Note that the PPA may still not provide the very latest stable/nightly build. (In my case, the latest stable build at the time of writing was v0.8+ and the version that I pulled from the PPA was v0.7+.) An issue that I faced with the PPA version in try to install certain plugins was this, which I was told could be resolved by switching to an even newer release. For that I turned to the next option.

Do not purge to avoid removing configuration files!

sudo apt remove -y neovim # remove previous installation (optional)
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:neovim-ppa/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install neovim

• Download the latest stable build from the Neovim releases page. For me, as of the time of writing this document, the latest stable version is NVIM v0.8.3. I prefer the Debian package nvim-linux64.deb.

• Then install it from your Downloads directory.

sudo apt install ./nvim-linux64.deb

• If you already had an older version of Neovim installed, you have to remove it and also auto-remove dependencies that may prevent installation of the deb package:

sudo apt remove --auto-remove neovim

• Try running Neovim as nvim. Set your $EDITOR environment variable to nvim. Alias vim to nvim if required. Put all these changes into your .bashrc.

• Verify that the version is as expected by running:

:version

• You may encounter a problem with Failed to load python3 host, which for me was resolved by downloading a package (possibly removed during autoremove):

sudo apt install python3-neovim

• After a complete installation, open your config file in ~/config/nvim/init.vim and update your configuration/settings.

• Run a :checkhealth command to see if things are in order. If optional providers are missing, you may want to update them. Turns out I had unintentionally uninstalled my clipboard program (xclip) which was caught by :checkhealth as in the absence of one, the clipboard functionality provided by Vim's + and * registers would not have worked. Reinstalling xclip fixed it immediately.