Neovim Vanilla (wrapper)

Neovim Vanilla is an option module for home-manager and NixOS to build a Neovim environment declaratively using Nix in a minimal fashion. Unlike NixVim or NVF, Neovim Vanilla doesn't try to take over your entire Neovim config. Its only job is to setup everything around your config so that you can get going quicker.

Neovim Vanilla aims to replace your plugin manager (e.g. lazy.nvim), nvim package manager mason.nvim, and even manages grammars for nvim-treesitter declaratively by leveraging nixpkgs. Due to the existence of previously mentioned Nix-based Neovim frameworks, basically every popular plugin, language server, linter, formatter, etc. are all already available in nixpkgs. Neovim Vanilla allows you to create a wrapped Neovim package that incorporates all of these and more into its environment.

In addition, Neovim plugins from nixpkgs are guaranteed to work with the version of Neovim you install from nixpkgs. This ensures maximum stability and removes the friction of upgrading your plugins only to downgrade immediately after when you realize the plugin expects a newer Neovim version.

This project is designed around the philosophy that it is an inherently bad idea to attempt to construct a script with Nix, it is better to leverage Nix for only what it is good at, and configure Neovim the intended way using lua.

Usage

In NixOS

Import the flake into your flake.nix then include inputs.neovim-vanilla-wrapped.nixosModules.neovim-vanilla-wrapped in your NixOS modules. Then within your NixOS config:

programs.neovim-vanilla = {
    enable = true;
};

In home-manager

Import the flake into your flake.nix then include inputs.neovim-vanilla-wrapped.hmModules.neovim-vanilla-wrapped in your home-manager modules. Then within your home-manager config:

programs.neovim-vanilla = {
    enable = true;
};

Full example config

Here is an example config that sets up language servers, installs all treesitter parsers, and installs a few plugins for good measure:

programs.neovim-vanilla = {
  enable = true;
  viAlias = true;
  vimAlias = true;
  plugins = {
    lsp = {
      enable = true;
      lspconfig.enable = true;  # Installs nvim-lspconfig plugin
      languageServers.packages = with pkgs; [
        # languageServers are only added to the wrapped neovim path, not the global path
        python313Packages.python-lsp-server
        vscode-langservers-extracted
      ];
    };
    treesitter = {
      enable = true;  # Installs the nvim-treesitter plugin and listed grammars
      parsers.installAll = true;  # Individial parsers can also be installed if you don't want all of them
    };
    # Install plugins here
    # 99% of the time, you want to use packages.start
    packages.start = with pkgs.vimPlugins; [
      autoclose-nvim
      nvim-colorizer-lua
    ];
  };
  extraPackages = with pkgs; [
    # extraPackages are only added to the wrapped neovim path, not the global path
    unzip  # For zip, xlsx, etc. files
  ];
};

You can inspect the module to find the full list of options.

Loading in Neovim

Loading plugins in Neovim with Neovim Vanilla is identical to loading plugins when using vim.pack. Simply require the plugin's main module and run setup if required. E.g.:

require("autoclose").setup { options = { pair_spaces = true } }
require("colorizer").setup { lazy_load = true }

Note that the main module does not nessisarily match the name of the package in nixpkgs, you will need to refer to the plugin docs for instructions on which module to import and use.