In my tour of Neovim starter kits, I landed on SpaceVim

I started my Emacs journey with Spacemacs, and used it for couple of years before settling on Doom Emacs.

Spacemacs inspired SpaceVim.

I had liked the mnenomic keybindings in Spacemacs (and now in SpaceVim)

But Spacevim is different from how other starter kits handle configuration.

Last week, I tried DoomVim (inspired by Doom Emacs) and NVChad (and “Neovim from scratch” by same folks as LunarVim) They all had similar configuration, based on lua

Today I discovered that I can open a nice floating Terminal in the middle of the screen by pressing Ctrl+\

Thanks to toggleterm plugin.

Earlier I used to use :terminal command, which would open a terminal in another tab. I had to switch tabs to use the terminal and going back to editing the files.

With toggleterm I press Ctrl+\, do my terminal tasks, and toggle it again to send it the background. (At least that is what I think happens, since next time I summon it, I can continue where I left off, not a new shell.)

I’ve started watching this YouTube playlist Neovim from scratch

It is a great learning resource.

I use a program called espanso for hotkey expansion across the OS, that has emoji completion option. But it does not work with Vim. Maybe because of modal editing 🤷

While it took me some time to figure out, setting it up is quite straight forward.

1. Install the plugin. Add the following ‘~/.config/nvim/lua/user/plugins.lua’ file use "hrsh7th/cmp-emoji" -- Markdown emoji (Search for -- cmp plugins in the file)

On the Vim Telegram group, I came across this starter kit called Neovim from scratch

But this starter kit is different from others. Others are opinionated (with a good reason). This one seems like purpose built.

Purpose being - to teach the users what goes under the hood. So it comes with a YouTube series.

But ones doesn’t need to follow the YouTube series to use this. One can just clone the git repo and get going.

Today I spent some time getting projectile equivalent working with LunarVim

At first I went with builtin/core plugin projects.nvim. Enabling it was quite straight forward. I wasn’t sure how to add new project.

Then I tried telescope-projects. Even here I could not add new project (Per their documentation, it is Ctrl-a in Insert mode, and just c in normal mode) But I just opened the project root I wanted to work on, and it got added to the list of projects.

Once I got Neovide working with LunarVim, I realized that I had not updated LunarVim for a long time.

I was already in rolling branch, so I did git pull origin rolling

Big mistake.

Things broke.

After RTFM, I noticed that there is :LvimUpdate command in LunarVim.

But by this time, my config was so broken that nothing worked 😞

Luckily, I found the old instructions that helped me initially.

Following those instructions, I was able to get “up and running”

So I tried VimR for some time, but it always felt odd. Sure all the LunarVim keybindings worked. But VimR wasn’t just Neovim client. It comes with its own features like the side panes for Files, Buffers, Markdown etc.

Also, it won’t really quit. :q! would destroy the window, but it would remain in the dock.

So for main work, I used Emacs.

Then today in Doom Emacs Telegram group, someone started talking about Vim. After some time, I ended up subscribing to Vim Telegram group, and asked about better neovim GUI.

After setting up LunarVim, I wanted to get it to work with a NeoVim GUI

I had tried some in the past, but did not like any.

Then (I think on Discord) I came across some discussion that they got LunarVim (lvim henceforth) to work with Neoclide.

I couldn’t even get it to run 😞

I tried VimR, and it worked. i.e. I got it running. But I didn’t like their default look.

After my problems with Doom NVim, I decided to go back to LunarNVim.

I had never really left, but since both Doom and Lunar are NVim based configurations, they may overwrite the configurations (like from ~/.local/share/nvim/)

So I completely removed both Doom and Lunar and reinstalled.

I also installed ltex LSP for makrdown, which I could not do with Doom Nvim.

My other requirement was projectile equivalent. I found that there is :Telescope projects built-in with Lunar.

Just I was getting excited about Doom NVim, today I read (on their Discord server) that Alejandro aka NTBBloodbath on github has lost interest in Doom Nvim

To quote him :

I’ll slowly try to finally make Emacs my primary code editor (always failed in each attempt haha), Neovim’s ecosystem isn’t going in the direction I would like and I think it never will be so I’m very frustrated and sad with it.