Configure Nvim with Lua: Basic Options (1)

It is important to have a domain of the text editors that we use to develop software, or simply edit texts. That is why I want to explain how I have one of the most used and stable in the industry, Vim, configured in my work environment. I want to clarify that we will only be looking at how to configure it, not how to work with vim/nvim, but I can recommend those who are starting to watch the series of basic videos on how to improve the productivity of the channel Compa compila from youtube. Also, you can learn with:

 vim

:help

or, do the Vim tutor, a 30-minute interactive course for the basic commands

 vimtutor

According to the official Vim site it is: “Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to make creating and changing any kind of text very efficient” Also, It has some interesting features:

• persistent, multi-level undo tree
• extensive plugin system
• support for hundreds of programming languages and file formats
• powerful search and replace
• integrates with many tools

With Vim you can use vimscript and/or lua language to do the configurations. In this case, we use Lua.

What is Lua?

According to the official Vim site it is: “Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It supports procedural programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, data-driven programming, and data description.”

If you are interested in learning about Lua, you can go to official Lua site.

We going to see how to configure Neovim. For this, we have a init.vim or init.lua file (never both). I recommend you study the documentation of vim to expand knowledge on this topic. They can open the editor (vim) and run the following command:

:help config

The main configuration file is located here:

For a better organization of the configurations we have the option to put them modularly, all the Lua modules must go inside the lua/ folder

If you have a mymodule.mysubmodule module, each directory is searched for lua/mymodule/mysubmodule.lua, or lua/mumodule/mysubmodule/init.lua.

You can use require() to load the modules. Example:

  require('mymodule')

It is not necessary to put the extension .lua. Also, you can load submodules in two ways:

  require('other_modules.anothermodule')

  require('other_modules/anothermodule')

Another important information is to know that if a module does not exist or that module has an error, the execution can be stopped. To prevent unexpected errors you can use pcall()

  local ok, _ = pcall(require, 'module_with_error')
  if not ok then
    -- not loaded
  end

Again, I recommend you study the documentation of vim to expand knowledge on this topic. They can open the editor (vim) and run the following command:

  :help lua-require

I think we can start configuring now. The first thing we will do is create the file where the basic vim configurations will be, example: if we want to see the number of lines.

1. We move to the nvim folder:

  cd .config/nvim

2. We create the main configuration file, we save it and close (at the moment we do not add content, you can still put a comment :-)):

  nvim init.lua

3. Then, we create the lua directory and inside our first module (where we are going to put the basic configurations).

  mkdir -p lua/configs/options
  nvim lua/configs/options/init.lua

4. We add this code and save it:

  local options = {
    number = true -- show line numbers
  }

  for k, v in pairs(options) do
    vim.opt[k] = v
  end

• There are two important points here.:
  • The first thing is to declare a variable with the configurations that we want (in this case so that the numbers of lines are show).
  • The second part uses the wrapper vim.opt.* as a mechanism to assign settings in Lua.

5. Lastly, to use these settings, we need to call the settings file in the main file (init.lua)

  nvim init.lua

• Add this:

  require('configs.options')

You already have configured to display the line numbers. Also, We can add other configurations:

  local options = {
    number = true,            -- show line numbers
    relativenumber = true,    -- Show the line number relative to the line with the cursor in front of each line
    cursorline = true,        -- highlight the current line
    tabstop = 2,              -- Number of spaces that a <Tab> in the file counts for
    shiftwidth = 2,           -- Number of spaces to use for each step of (auto)indent
    expandtab = true,         -- Use the appropriate number of spaces to insert a <Tab>
    backup = false,           -- disabled the creation of backups
    cmdheight = 2,            -- Number of screen lines to use for the command-line
    fileencoding = 'utf-8',   -- File-content encoding for the current buffer
    hlsearch = true,          -- When there is a previous search pattern, highlight all its matches
    showmatch = true          -- When a bracket is inserted, briefly jump to the matching one
  }

1. cursorline: marks the line when the cursor is found.
2. tabstop, shiftwidth y expandtab: this is used for config the tabs spaces.

You can add other configurations, you can see what each of them does by searching the vim documentation:

  :help number
  :help cursorline

We have the directory of folders like this:

nvim
├─ init.lua
└─ lua
  └─ configs
    └─ options
      └─ init.lua

Conclusion

I think that this way you are ready to continue with the configuration of your preferences. I hope it will be helpful for those who want to experiment and those who are planning to take on vim/nvim as one of their main, or main text editor.

Resources

• Lua website
• Vim website
• Neovim website
• Nvim-Lua Guide