What Neovim shipped in 2022

Neovim is the world’s most-loved editor. That’s just science:

Here are some highlights from Neovim 2022 (Nvim 0.8) development.

UI

Eye candy first!

• ‘winhighlight’ was throughly reimplemented as window-local highlight namespaces. This is backwards-compatible while enabling many new usecases, like window-local syntax highlighting.
• global ‘statusline’ designates one statusline for all windows. Try it:

  :set laststatus=3
  

• 'winbar' is like an extra statusline at the top of each window. It complements laststatus=3:

  set winbar=%f
  set laststatus=3
  

• 'winbar' and 'statusline' gained support for mouse-click regions (as ’tabline’ has had since 2016):
  • 
• Experimental zero-height command-line:

  :set cmdheight=0
  

• The ‘mousescroll’ option controls vertical/horizontal mouse scroll behavior.

  :set mousescroll=ver:5,hor:2
  

• The new ‘statuscolumn’ option gives full control of the “gutter”, with the same familiar format of ‘statusline’. It even supports click events, just like ‘statusline’, ’tabline’, and ‘winbar’.
  • Feature author @luukvbaal also provides a plugin with various pre-packaged ‘statuscolumn’ configs.
  • Try it!

    :set rnu nu 
    :let &stc='%#NonText#%{&nu?v:lnum:""}%=%{&rnu&&(v:lnum%2)?"\ ".v:relnum:""}%#LineNr#%{&rnu&&!(v:lnum%2)?"\ ".v:relnum:""}'
    
• Marks can save and restore viewport info.

  :set jumpoptions=view
  

  • When you jump around, or switch buffers with ctrl-^, the viewport is restored instead of resetting/recentering vertically.
• vim.ui_attach (experimental) enables in-process Lua plugins to hook into the same events exposed to all Nvim UIs. pic.twitter.com/w9U87jGfIL
  • noice.nvim was an early adopter (a matter of days!).
  • 

LSP

• Summary of the history and status of Nvim builtin LSP support.
• Nvim LSP client now supports connecting to language servers by TCP.

  vim.lsp.start({ name = 'godot', cmd = vim.lsp.rpc.connect('127.0.0.1', 6008) })
  

• New core events for LSP: LspAttach, LspDetach. Example:

  vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd('LspAttach', {
    group = yourGroupID,
    callback = function(args)
      local client = vim.lsp.get_client_by_id(args.data.client_id)
      your_callbac_func(client, args.buf)
    end
  }
  

• vim.lsp.get_active_clients() learned to filter (this will be a standard pattern in the Lua stdlib):

  get_active_clients({id=42})
  get_active_clients({bufnr=99})
  get_active_clients({name='tsserver'})
  

Editor

• Nvim now includes treesitter parsers for C, Lua, and Vimscript. This is a step towards “treesitter by default” for common languages, instead of regex-based vim syntax definitions.
• tree-sitter spellcheck constrained to extmark region.
• The diff-mode “linematch” feature improves rendering of same-line diff changes:

  :set diffopt+=linematch:60
  

  • 
• Nvim supports editorconfig, and enables it by default. Nvim detects “.editorconfig” files in your project and applies the settings.
  • To opt-out of this feature, add this to your config:

    vim.g.editorconfig_enable = false
    

• Plugins can provide a live preview of user-defined commands.
  • This extends the builtin 'inccommand' feature (since 2017), which show the effects of :substitute (:s/foo/bar) as you type.
  • Example: The live-command.nvim plugin adds preview for :normal and macros:
• You can now implement ‘inccommand’ preview for any user-defined command. This builds a foundation for live preview of :normal, :global, etc.

  vim.api.nvim_create_user_command(
    'MyCmd',
    my_cmd,
    { …, preview = my_cmd_preview })
  

• The :write command gained the ++p flag, so this creates parent/dir/ if it doesn’t exist:

  :edit parent/dir/file.txt
  :write ++p
  

• Nvim now stores “session data” (shada, persistent undo, …) in $XDG_STATE_HOME (/.local/state) instead of $XDG_CACHE_HOME (/.cache). This change only affects macOS/unix, the Windows locations are unchanged.
• Plugins can also use stdpath('log') to get the recommended location for log files.
• gO in the manpage viewer (:help :Man) shows an outline (table of contents) in the location list. Now the outline also lists the flags.
  • 

Performance

• Filetype detection uses Lua (instead of Vimscript) + “on-demand” strategy => 7x speedup vs the old filetype.vim, saves 5+ ms on startup:

  before:
    9.0ms: sourcing …/runtime/filetype.vim
  after:
    1.3ms: sourcing …/runtime/filetype.lua
  

• nvim --startuptime now reports Lua require() times.

  000.010  000.010: --- NVIM STARTING ---
  000.198  000.188: event init
  ...
  026.333  001.109  001.101: require('vim.lsp.protocol')
  028.144  000.423  000.423: require('vim.lsp._snippet')
  ...
  

• A brief summary of Nvim ‘packpath’ improvements:
  • 
• Fast, slick folds provided by a plugin.

Defaults

• ‘mouse’ option is set by default (again). Was disabled since 2017 “until a better approach”. Now we have it:

  mouse=nvi
  Type ":" (cmdline-mode) to temporarily disable mouse. Right-click shows a popup menu.
  Try it!
  

API

• nvim_parse_cmd() provides the foundation for nvim_cmd([list]) and “user cmd-preview”! And super useful for defining custom cmdline (:) behavior.

  :echo nvim_parse_cmd('.,$g/foo/bar', {})
  {
   'cmd': 'global',
   'args': ['/foo/bar'],
   'mods': {…},
   'magic': {'file': v:false, 'bar': v:false}
  }
  

• Use nvim_cmd() to call any Vim legacy command in a structured way, like system([...]).
  • Don’t need fnameescape(): special chars are controlled by the magic param.

    nvim_cmd({cmd='vimgrep', args={'/%s/j', '**'}}, {})
    

• nvim-oxi: “first-class Rust bindings (FFI to Nvim C) to the rich API exposed by Neovim.”

Lua

• Check out the vim.fs module for filesystem operations.
  • vim.fs.find() is now the canonical way to find “root files”, common for LSP configuration.
• vim.cmd is the Lua nvim_cmd wrapper. It supports calling Ex commands as functions instead of strings:

  vim.cmd.colorscheme('nightfox')
  

• Lua plugins continue to mature:

  “Lua plugins are basically the same as a vim plugin, except the file extension is .lua instead of .vim and the file contains Lua code instead of Vimscript.”

  • This elegant interface required lots of careful work, largely thanks to @bfredl!

Maintenance

• Work by @dundargoc closed two refactor epics started in 2014 and 2017: #567 #7401
• Progress on vim9script => Nvim-Lua transpiler from core maintainer @teej_dv will enable us to continue pulling test coverage from Vim, plus syntax, ftplugins, and even plugins like cfilter.
• Nightly + stable releases now provide a universal binary (ARM/M1, Intel) for macOS 11+.

Documentation

Automated generation of the online Nvim documentation was rewritten by replacing an old AWK script with Lua + tree-sitter. We can have nice things.

• Improved styling
• Nested lists
• Soft-wrapped “flow” layout on selected pages (example)
• Improved parsing of vim :help tokens

Compare the old layout (left) to the new one (right):

Job control

Nvim now sets the $NVIM environment variable in jobstart() and :terminal jobs, so child processes have an unambiguous hint that they are children of Nvim. The old $NVIM_LISTEN_ADDRESS, which had conflicting “dual purposes”, is no longer passed to children.

RPC

Nvim UIs are just (inverted) plugins. And now nvim itself is a self-hosting UI: when you run nvim in a terminal, it starts the TUI as a nvim --embed child process.

Just like Nvim GUIs, you can connect the nvim TUI to any Nvim server to see its UI! You can try it right now:

1. Start a server at address ./foo (creates a foo file in the current directory):

   nvim --listen ./foo
   

2. From a different terminal (in the same directory as ./foo), connect nvim to the server:

   nvim --remote-ui --server ./foo
   

Deprecations

• Removed the 'insertmode' option, which was used in Vim to implement “easy vim”.
  • We’re driving towards making the same behavior possible as a plugin. See :help 'insertmode'.
• cscope support was removed, because it is mostly redundant with the LSP client (:help lsp).
  • Note: ctags support will never be removed, it is far more common and generally useful.