Yesterday, I spent a fair amount of time cleaning up my Neovim config files. This mostly consisted in removing non-essential plugins, and replacing old Vimscript with Lua code, thanks to the mini.nvim project. If you’re using vim-surround, hop or other jumper, or even clever-f, please have a look at what mini.nvim has to offer. It even features a minimal completion engine that I adopted right away since the successor of nvim-compe is a no-brainer for me (why would we need to install 4 to 7 plugins instead of one?!).
At some point I was about to discard packer and just rely on the builtin packadd approach, together with a set of Git submodules, that Evgeni Chasnovski uses for his own Neovim setup, but packer is great for it manages everything so gently, including filetype-specific plugins. Lazy loading is really great sometimes.
Finally, the number of packages I rely on is limited and I believe my startup time remains quite decent (< 100 ms):1
~ % tree -L 2 .local/share/nvim/site/pack/packer
.local/share/nvim/site/pack/packer
├── opt
│ ├── iron.nvim
│ ├── magma-nvim
│ ├── neogen
│ ├── parinfer-rust
│ ├── vim-table-mode
│ ├── vim-test
│ └── vimtex
└── start
├── Comment.nvim
├── gitsigns.nvim
├── null-ls.nvim
├── nvim-dap
├── nvim-lightbulb
├── nvim-lspconfig
├── nvim-treesitter
├── packer.nvim
├── plenary.nvim
├── popup.nvim
├── telescope-bibtex.nvim
├── telescope-fzf-native.nvim
├── telescope-github.nvim
├── telescope.nvim
├── telescope-symbols.nvim
└── telescope-ui-select.nvim
25 directories, 0 files
~ % vim-profiler.py nvim
Running nvim to generate startup logs... done.
Loading and processing logs... done.
Plugin directory: /home/chl/.local/share/nvim/site/pack/packer/start
=====================================
Top 10 plugins slowing nvim's startup
=====================================
1 0.774 nvim-treesitter
2 0.183 telescope.nvim
3 0.093 nvim-lspconfig
4 0.044 plenary.nvim
=====================================
times in msec
clock self+sourced self: sourced script
clock elapsed: other lines
Results from vim --startuptime:
000.020 000.020: --- NVIM STARTING ---
000.965 000.945: locale set
001.487 000.523: inits 1
001.499 000.012: window checked
--8<--------
-------->8--
076.311 001.266: loading rtp plugins
076.683 000.085 000.085: sourcing /home/chl/.local/share/nvim/site/pack/packer/start/nvim-lspconfig/plugin/lspconfig.vim
077.273 000.501 000.501: sourcing /home/chl/.local/share/nvim/site/pack/packer/start/nvim-treesitter/plugin/nvim-treesitter.vim
077.435 000.045 000.045: sourcing /home/chl/.local/share/nvim/site/pack/packer/start/plenary.nvim/plugin/plenary.vim
077.813 000.183 000.183: sourcing /home/chl/.local/share/nvim/site/pack/packer/start/telescope.nvim/plugin/telescope.vim
077.952 000.827: loading packages
077.986 000.034: loading after plugins
077.998 000.013: inits 3
081.488 003.489: reading ShaDa
081.647 000.159: opening buffers
081.673 000.027: BufEnter autocommands
081.676 000.003: editing files in windows
082.048 000.373: VimEnter autocommands
082.052 000.003: UIEnter autocommands
082.432 000.280 000.280: sourcing /usr/share/nvim/runtime/autoload/provider/clipboard.vim
082.440 000.108: before starting main loop
083.690 001.250: first screen update
083.692 000.003: --- NVIM STARTED ---
I rewrote 50% of my old pure Vim config. The remaining is just the after/ftplugin/*, ftplugin/*, and autoload/* stuff, which I keep as Vimscript for compatibility issues.
♪ Adam Wakeman • Lean on Me
vim-profiler is available from GitHub. ↩︎