Switching to Neovim & Lua

Long time Vim user migrates to Neovim

Less than a year ago, I migrated to Neovim from Vim because others where I worked were doing it. Also, I was growing frustrated with how slow my Vim setup was getting and thought that Neovim would solve a lot of those problems for me. And the transition did! It was mostly painless to switch to Neovim from Vim. I had to change my package manager for consistency with some of the documentation and needed to tweak a small number of configurations because now I was using CoC for my LSP support. This was happening at a time where I wasn’t super aware of the LSP support that was incoming to Neovim natively in Lua.

Switching to using Neovim and Lua

So I have not touched the architecture of my Vim setup in a while. I set it up once thanks to the helpful guidance of Steve Francia and a guide that he made called The Ultimate Vim Distribution and have not looked back at it since. Certainly, I’ve added a lot since I started using Vim as my daily text editor. I’ve even moved over to using Neovim full-time too. My personal machines don’t even have Vim installed on it. It’s Neovim for me all the way. But, I did notice that there was a significant amount of slow down on my machine most likely due to the bloat over almost eight years of using Vim full-time at this point.

So I started looking into disabling certain plugins or disabling certain features in my Tmux configuration to make things run smoother. But then, I started thinking about the problem a different way. What if my Vim configuration and Vimscript-based LSP was slowing me down? So I did some digging on how to configure Neovim with a preference for Lua-based plugins rather than Vimscript-based plugins.

The reasoning behind using Lua-based plugins is that they should be a lot faster. According to the motivation for Neovim , Neovim is a much better more current version of Vim written in Lua. Because of this, I assumed that Lua-based Neovim plugins are faster than Vimscript-based plugins.

I wouldn’t have been able to do this without the community

I’m thankful for the Neovim community for self-documenting configurations and plugins so that’s easier to understand and tweak these things. I have developed a lot of muscle memory around my use of Vim. The following links helped me a lot, Heiker Curiel’s Lua-based configuration guide for Neovim and Chris@Machine’s YouTube playlist for setting up Neovim from scratch .

This was a lot harder than I thought

I didn’t realize that I would need to learn Lua before I could get my Neovim up and running. This is clearly a lack of foresight on my part. I was really assuming that I would be mostly copying and pasting configuration pieces around. But what I hadn’t thought about is that the Neovim configuration community is very opinionated and that it’s still not as mature as the Vim community. A lot of the documentation that I encountered was either making a lot of assumptions of the reader or was just incorrect/missing/confusing for any number of reasons.

Not really a bad thing though

This isn’t really a bad thing though. I just don’t think that the path I took of configuring Neovim is for everyone. There are a lot of super helpful guides on how to set this stuff up and a lot of them are opinionated enough to be useful for most use-cases out of the box. The issues I ran into are unique to me and don’t really speak to the authors of the plugins I am using.

If you’re the kind of person who is doesn’t yet have a lot of muscle memory around how you will work with Neovim, starting from scratch will be super helpful.

Giving back

To give back to the Neovim community, I’ll be starting a short series of posts which will talk about how I tied together a lot of my own Neovim configuration. Hopefully this helps others including future me.

For now, you can view my Neovim configuration in my Dotfiles repository .