Pranav

neo-vim

Nov 19, 20245 min read

The internet is riddled with a lot of information and many opinionated configs for you to quickly install and start using NeoVim without understanding any of the configs. However, knowing how NeoVim works and plugin ecosystems will give you more power to make the config more personal to meet your needs than using someone else’s.

I’ve loved Kickstarter by TeejDev and started customizing it based on the good parts of NVChad that I’ve found. You can find my current config here on GitHub - pranavtechie/nvim-config

https://neo.vimhelp.org/ (HTML Version of the current Nvim docs)

Pro Tip

You can open NeoVim by typing nvim in the terminal. If you want to open NeoVim without any of the configurations that you’ve setup. You can use the --clean flag (nvim --clean to open without any configuration changes)

Current Environments I’ve tried

Not yet categorized list

Things I want

  • all the basics, treesitter, status bar, autocomplete, lsp, file tree, tab bar (nvchad),
  • proper telescope setup as shown in kickstarter by TeejDev
  • use the jk shortcut, ZZ for exit, other

Basic Vim Keybindings

i - insert mode A - append mode - moves the cursor to the end of the line <Esc> - enters normal mode

Motions

Cursor Based

j - move down k - move up l - move right h - move left

Word Based

e - move to the end of the word w - move to the start of the next word b - move to the start of the word

Line Based

0 - move to the start of the line $ - move to the end of the line (after last character)

View Based (Current Screen)

<C-f> - scrolls the view down by full screen length <C-b> - scrolls the view up by full screen length

File Based

gg - go to the start of the file G - go to the end of the file <number>G - will take the cursor to the specified line number

Occurrence

# - move to the previous occurrence of the word under the cursor * - move to the next occurrence of the word under the cursor

Operators

d - c - change - replace y - yank (copy) the line to the buffer

p - put command, pastes the thing in the buffer one line below the cursor r - replace, place the cursor on a character, type r and the character to replace the current character with

% - clicking on it will take the cursor to the matching parenthesis and toggles between them

<Operator><Motion>

dw - delete word and move to the next word d$ - delete from current position to the end of the line

Commands

:set number - show line numbers on the open file :q - quit :qa - quit all buffers :qa! - force quit all buffers - ignore unsaved changes and warnings :w - write :wqa - write and quit all

Searching

/<text> - to search and highlight something on the page (forward search) ?<text> - starts searching from the bottom of the file (backward search)

:noh - (no highlight) to remove the highlighted section from the page

n - to go to the next occurrence N - to go to the previous occurrence <C-o> - to go to the origin cursor position

Substitute

:s/<old>/<new>/ - changes all the occurrences of <old> with <new> for the first match for the substitution to have affect on all occurrences in the line - you have to use the g (global) parameter like :s/<old>/<new>/g

Understanding Configuration

  • Using the lazy.vim as the package manager in the structured file setup, multiple plugins are stored as individual files and multiple packages can be grouped in a spec file.
  • The configuration for each plugin can either be done in the init.lua file or in the individual/spec file of the plugin.

* - to match occurence of words currently under the cursor

Packages

  • Telescope - fuzzy search
  • Neotree - file tree
  • Catppuccin - Appearance / Theme
  • Lualine - statusbar
  • LSP Setup
  • Treesitter - parser

Graph View

Backlinks

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