Modern Vim

Opening Files

Remember that fuzzy finding (like telescope does) just needs the letters to be in the string and in that order, not near each other. So app/routes/settings/user-management could be found by arsu-. Letters at the start of a word will be given priority over those within a word.

Plugins

’Packages’ are folders which contain one or more plugins. By convention you install them in ~/.config/nvim/pack. Plugins in the start subdirectory of the package should run when Neovim starts. Just putting a plugin inside a package installs it, so if I need to get rid of Lazy at some point I can just clone the plugin repos into pack.

Plugins can be added at runtime, until restarted, with :packadd plugin-name, which also adds them to Neovim’s runtimepath.

You then generate the help docs for the plugin with :helptags ~/.config/nvim/pack/*/doc. Needs to be re-run after updates as it’s not automatically updated when files change.

Incidentally, seems you can follow hyperlinks in the docs with <C-]>.

Terminal

:!{cmd} is handy for quickly running one off commands from Neovim’s command line.

You can Ctrl-z to suspend Neovim and go back to the terminal, then fg to resume. But running the terminal in Neovim gives you access to stuff like search, yank and all your other keybinds.

When typing in the built-in terminal emulator, you enter Terminal mode which can have its own keybinds.

The terminal starts in Normal mode, and any of i, I, a or A puts you in Terminal mode. To get back to Normal the default keybind is Ctrl-\+Ctrln.

:read !{cmd} can be used to run a command and read the output into the current buffer, while :term {cmd} reads the output into a new ‘terminal buffer’ which is updated every second or so if the command keeps running.

Opening a terminal in a buffer with :term does so in an ‘alternate file’, which allows you to switch between the terminal and the underlying buffer with Ctrl-^. gf to open the filepath under the cursor works the same way.

Terminal buffers suspend with Neovim, and will be restored from sessions.

Autocommands

Defined with the syntax autocmd {event} {pattern} {command} where event is like BufReadPost or BufWritePre, pattern is a regex applied to the filename and command is, funnily enough, a command to run when the event & pattern are matched.

You can define multiple comma-separated events, and the current file is available in command as <afile> (so to get the filename you can use expand('<afile>')).

For the FileType event pattern is matched against the filetype, not the filename.

autocmd! removes all autocommands for the current group.