It hasn’t taking long before I decided to trash my new Lua config. I originally wanted to give lazy.nvim a try since packer has been discontinued. I was not able to reduce my startup time further, and this wasn’t in par with my old packer-based config. Independent of this, I felt quite unhappy with the added layer of complexity provided by mason.nvim and satellite plugins. More to the point, some LSPs, linters (for nvim-lint) or formatters (for conform.nvim) were not available in Mason registry, meaning that I add to configure them outside of Mason handlers, in addition to installing them myself. That makes these plugins rather limited in their usefulness, IMHO. So, let’s rewrite it from scratch!

First, I’ve stuck to the aim of working on a single configuration file, rather than splitting it up into different files in the dedicated lua directory. Also, I decided to stop using a plugin manager since Vim and Neovim both ship with a decent plugin system. What’s more, it will help me not to update my plugins every two days or so. And I get the full Git log as well. In a few words, I ended up with the following set of plugins:

~/.config/nvim
» tree -L 3 pack
pack
└── plugins
    ├── opt
    │   ├── neogen
    │   ├── nvim-colorizer
    │   ├── vim-dasht
    │   └── vim-sexp
    └── start
        ├── Comment
        ├── fzf-lua
        ├── nvim-lspconfig
        ├── nvim-treesitter
        ├── nvim-treesitter-textobjects
        ├── orgmode
        └── vimtex

14 directories, 0 files

As can be seen, I put orgmode and vimtex in the “start” folder, which means they are loaded when Neovim is fired up. My own benchmarks suggest this has no noticeable effect on startup time. With only fzf-lua, I’m at 25 ms of startup time, while the full config increases it by about 20-25 ms. That’s cheap. Note that I don’t use a lot of plugins, I have a lot of custom settings living in my after/ftplugin directory, plus additional commands and autocommands.

I think about it this way: you really want a clever fuzzy picker, and I already Fzf to manage my shell history, browsing directory, or managing my bibliographic entries in the shell. By the way, I upgraded my very outdated version of Fzf that I got via the official apt repository. Now I’m running version 0.43.0 (d3311d9) and I can use git_bcommits and git_commits again (it stopped working in recent months, which I bissected to this commit). Besides, the availability of default LSP settings as well as treesitter “text objects” is often an underrated value: you get both linting and formatting for free (Neovim builtins and Fzf can take care of the rest for you), as well as semantic and/or structural editing capabilities. When no fixer is available, yuo can always rely on formatprg or autocommands.

I use vim-dasht to complement the LSP hover provider, or simply as a documentation handler when there’s no LSP in use (e.g., Scheme, Lisp); it also proved to be useful with Python for which pyright provides nothing more than function signature in most cases. I use neogen to generate Python and C’s docstrings. I’m too lazy to think about it (or even remember how to format Google and Numpy docstrings), so this comes handy in this particular case. As said above, I can manage formatting and linting myself, and Neovim has excellent support for completion via C-x C-o, C-x C-n, C-x C-f, and friends. The rest is already builtin, e.g., want a tree explorer, try :15Lex; need some Git info, FzfLua get you covered. Everything that is not related to text editing per se is probably better handled in your terminal by a dedicated application.