Neovim Flake

Neovim in nix.

Try it out:

$ nix run github:konradmalik/neovim-flake

Assumptions

• keeps all Neovim config in lua as it's supposed to be
• uses nix for system dependencies, plugins and packaging

That way nix is a layer on top, just used for packaging and reproducibility. It does not interfere with the standard way to configure Neovim.

Things to note

• Uses NVIM_APPNAME to differentiate from other Neovim instances. It's set to neovim-pde or neovim-pde-hm for home-manager or native when running in "dev mode" (configurable).

Home Manager

There is a home-manager module provided, which links the configuration to your XDG_CONFIG_HOME folder and loads it from there.

This is the recommended way to use this flake "day-to-day" in your NixOS system.

Self-contained mode

When running/using neovim-pde from the flake directly it runs in self-contained mode.

This means that it appends its config in nix store to your $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS and use -u flag to force-load this specific init.lua. This means that any init.lua in your local $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/$NVIM_APPNAME won't be loaded, even if $NVIM_APPNAME is neovim-pde (I think that after folders and others that don't need to be required explicitly will be loaded, so those should work if put to the proper $NVIM_APPNAME folder, but I've never tested this).

That also means that exrc functionality won't work (e.g. local .nvim.lua files won't be loaded automatically). If you rely on that feature (I sometimes do) then consider using the provided home-manager module.

Experimentation

One of the cons of using Neovim in nix is - no "dirty" modifications to Neovim to try something out quickly. Experimentation becomes harder. You always need to rebuild it, but nix build and then ./result/bin/nvim is quick and easy enough for it to not be a deal-breaker.

Another solution implemented in this repo is nvim-dev command that becomes available inside devShell here. It runs the neovim package defined in the repo with plugins and nix-generated lua files provided, but the native lua config gets read "live" from ./config/native here in the repo. This allows for instant feedback and dynamic development just like when using neovim without nix.

Notes

composed of my reddit posts

What's great in using Neovim through nix is a way to generate lua files from nix. It allows configuring LSP to use binaries directly from nix store as opposed to getting them from PATH, especially useful for the most common LSPs that I always expect to have.

What I don't like in those "nixvim" flakes is that people most often use only nix for everything. While most certainly you can generate all of your config, all of your lua files from nix, I think it's a bad idea since you lose all completion, diagnostics, and all neodev niceness for lua.

Credits

Inspired by:

• https://primamateria.github.io/blog/neovim-nix/