Neovim is a modern and powerful text editor that inherits the best features of Vim and adds new ones. One of the great things about Neovim is that it supports a rich ecosystem of plugins that can enhance your productivity and creativity. In this article, I will introduce some of the useful plugins for Neovim that I have tried and liked.
NvimTree
NvimTree is a file explorer plugin that opens in the sidebar. It is easy to navigate and has a customizable config. It integrates nicely with LSP, and Git and provides mouse support. For me, no config modifications were needed – works perfectly out of the box¹.
vim-surround
vim-surround was created by tpope, a well-known Vim plugin creator. It is another plugin that I cannot live without. As the name suggests, it lets you surround an object with quotes, brackets or tags. But it goes even further – it lets you change the surroundings or delete them altogether. It requires no config, and you can learn the keybindings within minutes. Check out the vim-surround docs to learn the motions².
nvim-lspconfig
With version 0.5, Neovim shipped a native LSP support. nvim-lspconfig is a plugin that aims to make LSP configuration a breeze. You can configure each LSP server separately. A list of supported LSP servers can be found here³.
fzf
fzf is a plugin that largely contributes to the speed of editing in Neovim. It lets you open a fuzzy search in a floating window, to find files, perform a project-wide search and more. Just make sure to install the fzf dependency⁴.
dashboard-nvim
If, like me, you spend a lot of time in your code editor, it’s important to make it look nice, but also make it easy to move around. Dashboard plugin comes in handy in both cases. It makes Neovim feel more like an IDE, but also provides handy shortcuts to the most commonly used commands. It is highly configurable, so you may freely express yourself and make it your own.
lspsaga
lspsaga is another plugin responsible for LSP support. It adds various functions that are built in many top IDEs like: go to definition, code actions, refactoring, hover docs and more. It is another must-have on this list.
gruvbox
gruvbox is a beautiful and retro colorscheme that is easy on the eyes and supports many file types and plugins. It also has a Lua port that works well with Treesitter.colour scheme
Quickui
Quickui is a plugin that allows you to create and use UI components in Neovim, such as menus, dialogues, buttons, tabs, and more. It is very useful for creating custom workflows and interfaces.
Telescope
Telescope is a highly customizable fuzzy finder that lets you search and browse anything in Neovim, such as files, buffers, commands, git branches, and more. It also has many extensions that integrate with other tools and services, such as GitHub, Maven, Terraform, and Jupyter Notebook.
Treesitter
Treesitter is a library that provides fast and accurate syntax highlighting and code analysis for many programming languages. It also enables other plugins to offer features such as code folding, indentation, text objects, and more.
These are some of the useful plugins for Neovim that I have tried and liked, but there are many more that you can explore and try. If you are interested, you can check out some of the web sources that I used for this article, or you can ask me more questions about Neovim plugins. I hope you enjoyed this article and found it helpful. 😊
Visit this excellent website to track Neovim updates and collections of awesome Neovim plugins.
https://www.trackawesomelist.com/rockerBOO/awesome-neovim/week/
References:
(1) Essential neovim plugins – Krzysztof Kalamarski. https://kkalamarski.me/essential-neovim-plugins
(2) neovim-plugins · GitHub Topics · GitHub. https://github.com/topics/neovim-plugins
(3) Enhancing Your Neovim Editor with Awesome Plugins – Barbarian Meets Coding. https://www.barbarianmeetscoding.com/notes/neovim-plugins/
(4) GitHub – altermo/vim-plugin-list: A list of vim/neovim plugins …. https://github.com/altermo/vim-plugin-list
