According to Git, my vimrc is twelve years old, and it’s probably actually older. That’s a long time to accrue a lot of cruft. A lot has happened in the world of Vim in the past decade, with the emergence of NeoVim encouraging the development of features found in newer editors. Simultaneously, tooling for languages has improved significantly with the creation of the Language Server Protocol (LSP), and newer languages, such as Rust, learning from their predecessors and providing tooling out of the box. I think it’s time to wipe the slate clean and start anew, looking for modern solutions to configure the editor the way I want it to work.

My main goal is to have functionality rivaling that of “modern” editors and IDEs, while having access to the modes, keybindings and performance of Vim. NeoVim 0.5 provides a fantastic foundation for achieving this, with a native LSP client, Lua support, a built in terminal, and asynchronous jobs.

To start off, I’ve removed all but the most minimal settings to make NeoVim usable for me.

The ecosystem around the LSP client is still maturing, as 0.5 is yet to be released, but it’s starting to become viable as a daily driver.

• ncm2 already includes support for it, which provides completion-as-you-type for multiple sources (LSP, snippets, omnicomplete).
• diagnostic-nvim improves the user experience by delaying diagnostics while in insert mode - in most cases you don’t end up with a well-formed program with each key press - and utilizing floating windows to present information in a more readable manner.
• nvim-lsp-denite providing integration with Denite.

Currently, the most mature alternative to the NeoVim LSP client is CoC, which provides a great user experience, but tries to do too much for my taste. It appears to be providing a bridge to VSCode extensions.

I’m looking at using Denite as a unified interface for quickly navigating things like Code Actions, files, buffers, and git. It may also serve as a platform to run common tasks such as running tests in a consistent way. I haven’t used it previously, mostly due to the dependency on Python, but using it will remove the need for other plugins such as ctrlp.vim, fzf.vim, vim-clap, etc.

I will be elaborating on specific parts of my set up in future posts.