mgua's kickstart.nvim

Introduction

This project is heavily based on TJ DeVries amazing work to promote Neovim adoption and usage. Please see the original project nvim-lua/kickstart.nvim In my neovim journey I recently migrated from vimscript to lua, and I am still in the process of adjusting my setup.

I am working to make this kickstart a standard for my development team, which is easy to deploy on Windows Linux amd MacOSX systems. Kickstart is just a configuration procedure. It requires to have several components installed and prepared. In the following notes I will list the preparation activities to be performed on the different operating systems. A possible alternative approach is to use a neovim distribution, like

• LazyVim: maintained by @folke (the author of lazy.nvim package manager)

Linux

Neovim preparation and Installation for Linux

Ubuntu

from root:

• apt update
• apt upgrade
• apt install software-properties-common
• add-apt-repository ppa:neovim-ppa/stable
• apt update
• apt install ripgrep fd-find
• apt install neovim

Kali

from root:

• apt update
• apt upgrade
• apt install ripgrep fd-find
• cd
• mkdir neovim
• cd neovim
• curl -LO https://github.com/neovim/neovim/releases/latest/download/nvim.appimage
• chmod +x nvim.appimage
• cp nvim.appimage /usr/bin/
• ln -s /usr/bin/nvim.appimage /usr/bin/nvim
• (To be completed)

Almalinux

from root:

• yum update
• yum install ripgrep fd-find
• yum install neovim

Kickstart Configuration (in non privileged user context)

• Exit from nvim if open
• cd $HOME/.config
• mv nvim nvim_old
• mkdir nvim
• cd nvim
• git clone https://github.com/mgua/kickstart.nvim.git .

Start nvim now, and you should see the automatic download and updates by lazy

--

Windows

Neovim preparation and Installation for windows

actions to be executed from administrator user:

1. Chocolatey package manager installation (see https://chocolatey.org/)

• run the following from powershell admin
• Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://community.chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))
• close and reopen admin window

2. Winget package manager installation ( see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/package-manager/winget/ )

• install winget from microsoft store

3. from an administrator console, execute:

Kickstart Configuration (in non privileged user context)

• Exit from nvim if open
• cd $HOME/App.config
• mv nvim nvim_old
• mkdir nvim
• cd nvim
• git clone https://github.com/mgua/kickstart.nvim.git .

--

Kickstart.nvim targets only the latest 'stable' and latest 'nightly' of Neovim. If you are experiencing issues, please make sure you have the latest versions.

• Backup your previous configuration
• (Recommended) Fork this repo (so that you have your own copy that you can modify).
• Clone the kickstart repo into $HOME/.config/nvim/ (Linux/Mac) or ~/AppData/Local/nvim/ (Windows)
  • If you don't want to include it as a git repo, you can just clone it and then move the files to this location
• Start Neovim (nvim) and allow lazy.nvim to complete installation.
• Restart Neovim
• You're ready to go!

Additional system requirements:

• Make sure to review the readmes of the plugins if you are experiencing errors. In particular:
  • ripgrep is required for multiple telescope pickers.
• See as well Windows Installation

Configuration And Extension

• Inside of your fork, feel free to modify any file you like! It's your fork!
• Then there are two primary configuration options available:
  • Include the lua/kickstart/plugins/* files in your configuration.
  • Add new configuration in lua/custom/plugins/* files, which will be auto sourced using lazy.nvim
    • NOTE: To enable this, you need to uncomment { import = 'custom.plugins' } in your init.lua

You can also merge updates/changes from the repo back into your fork, to keep up-to-date with any changes for the default configuration

Example: Adding an autopairs plugin

In the file: lua/custom/plugins/autopairs.lua, add:

-- File: lua/custom/plugins/autopairs.lua

return {
  "windwp/nvim-autopairs",
  config = function()
    require("nvim-autopairs").setup {}
  end,
}

This will automatically install nvim-autopairs and enable it on startup. For more information, see documentation for lazy.nvim.

Example: Adding a file tree plugin

In the file: lua/custom/plugins/filetree.lua, add:

-- Unless you are still migrating, remove the deprecated commands from v1.x
vim.cmd([[ let g:neo_tree_remove_legacy_commands = 1 ]])

return {
  "nvim-neo-tree/neo-tree.nvim",
  version = "*",
  dependencies = {
    "nvim-lua/plenary.nvim",
    "nvim-tree/nvim-web-devicons", -- not strictly required, but recommended
    "MunifTanjim/nui.nvim",
  },
  config = function ()
    require('neo-tree').setup {}
  end,
}

This will install the tree plugin and add the command :Neotree for you. You can explore the documentation at neo-tree.nvim for more information.

Example: Adding a file to change default options

To change default options, you can add a file in the /after/plugin/ folder (see :help load-plugins) to include your own options, keymaps, autogroups, and more. The following is an example defaults.lua file (located at $HOME/.config/nvim/after/plugin/defaults.lua).

vim.opt.relativenumber = true

vim.keymap.set('n', '<leader>sr', require('telescope.builtin').resume, { desc = '[S]earch [R]esume' })

Contribution

Pull-requests are welcome. The goal of this repo is not to create a Neovim configuration framework, but to offer a starting template that shows, by example, available features in Neovim. Some things that will not be included:

• Custom language server configuration (null-ls templates)
• Theming beyond a default colorscheme necessary for LSP highlight groups

Each PR, especially those which increase the line count, should have a description as to why the PR is necessary.

FAQ

• What should I do if I already have a pre-existing neovim configuration?
  • You should back it up, then delete all files associated with it.
  • This includes your existing init.lua and the neovim files in ~/.local which can be deleted with rm -rf ~/.local/share/nvim/
  • You may also want to look at the migration guide for lazy.nvim
• What if I want to "uninstall" this configuration:
  • See lazy.nvim uninstall information
• Are there any cool videos about this plugin?
  • Current iteration of kickstart (coming soon)
  • Here is one about the previous iteration of kickstart: video introduction to Kickstart.nvim.

Windows Installation

Installation may require installing build tools, and updating the run command for telescope-fzf-native

See telescope-fzf-native documentation for more details

This requires:

• Install CMake, and the Microsoft C++ Build Tools on Windows

{'nvim-telescope/telescope-fzf-native.nvim', build = 'cmake -S. -Bbuild -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release && cmake --build build --config Release && cmake --install build --prefix build' }