Getting started with Neovim on a Mac

JohnWatsonAtBaker
2 min readJan 5, 2021

I’ve been learning vim for quite some time now. I had vim set up on my Mac and tried to use it as much as possible. I did all of my AOC 2020 puzzles in my tmux + vim set up running in Alacritty.

Alacritty + tmux + Vim

I heard many good things about Neovim and decided to give it a shot. Setting up Neovim is relatively easy considering I already had experience with .vimrc and vim-plug. Here is a breakdown of all the steps, in case I forget about them in the future.

  1. Install Neovim on Mac. I used Homebrew so I just typed: brew install Neovim
  2. Copy my existing Vim set up files to the Neovim directory. Both this and this will work.
  3. I ran into a small bump with the plugins. The fix is simple, change call plug#begin(‘~/.vim/plugged’) tocall plug#begin(‘~/.config/nvim/autoload/plugged’) in init.vim. Basically I am separating the plugin repos in Vim and NeoVim?
  4. I had nerdcommenter and nerdtree installed before and they worked fine. I installed an extra theme (onedark) and an autocompletion tool. Both installation processes are smooth just following the documentation.

I will update later how this set up goes. Hopefully I can get better at it.

Alacritty + tmux + Nvim

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