Neovim setup

Setup neovim like an IDE #

The following setup runs in WSL2 (Ubuntu 20.04) in a Windows 10 machine. Start by installing neovim and creating an empty configuration file:

sudo apt install neovim
mkdir .config/nvim
touch .config/nvim/init.vim

I proceeded with repeated “checkhealth” commands in neovim and tried to fix the errors. These were the required steps:

Python 2 installation #

In Ubuntu 20.04 there is neither python2 installed nor a pip2 command available. So I installed python2 and downloaded the get-pip.py helper script:

sudo apt install python2.7
curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/pip/2.7/get-pip.py --output get-pip.py
python2.7 get-pip.py
pip2 install neovim

Python 3 pynvim package upgrade #

In Ubuntu 20.04 the pynvim library is outdated. Start by installing pip3 and then purge the existing pynvim library. The install pynvim using pip3:

sudo apt install python3-pip
sudo apt purge python3-neovim python3-pynvim
sudo apt autoremove
pip3 install pynvim

Ruby and Nodejs libaries #

Towards an error free “checkhealth” command output install the necessary libraries:

gem install neovim
npm install -g neovim

Now your “checkhealth” output must be error free.

Plugin manager #

Vim Plug install

sh -c 'curl -fLo "${XDG_DATA_HOME:-$HOME/.local/share}"/nvim/site/autoload/plug.vim --create-dirs \
 https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim'

Start by editing your init.vim file in .config/nvim:

" Plugin Manager
call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged')
call plug#end()

COC plugin #

The COC plugin provides the VSCode like experience. So in your init.vim:

Plug 'neoclide/coc.nvim', {'branch': 'release'}

And then inside neovim:

:CocInstall coc-tsserver coc-eslint coc-json coc-prettier coc-css