this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Neovim
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When an ecosystem is new there is a lot of design space to explore. No one knows what the best ideas will be - the only way to find them is to try lots of things. After a while it becomes clearer what the good ideas are, and things settle down. That happened in Javascript when React and Vue became popular. You didn't see a new application framework every month anymore - at least not ones that got a lot of adoption. Exploration shifted to stuff like state-management libraries to use within React. Of course the search for better ideas never stops completely...
I’ve been updating my plugin managers for over ten years now. Would be nice if neovim just bundled a default plugin manager you could use and all the examples could use.
Vim's built-in packadd feature is available on Nvim too -- https://neovim.io/doc/user/repeat.html#packages ; and as long as there's a folder named 'lua' inside the package folder (e.g. $xdg_data_home/nvim/pack/the_package_name/start/), it's on lua's path/cpath as well.
One annoyance is making sure your lua modules can find luarocks you may have installed elsewhere. The easiest way to do that is to start nvim with an env LUA_{C,}PATH prefix pointing at the right folders.
The config examples for nvim plugins are just lua tables -- as long as the user has a clear idea as to how they're sourced alongside other stuff on the lua paths, it's not too big of a deal if the examples presuppose a particular manager. Lua isn't the prettiest language to read, though; and some of its syntactical 'shortcuts' can get annoying for people just starting out.