Isolated Install#

This uses 2 techniques to use a neovim version with a specific config without conflicting with whatever our current stable setup is:

  • Using symlinks to manage nvim versions.

    See Install using symlinks step in Install Neovim page on how we install a versioned binary.

  • Using Neovim’s built-in $NVIM_APPNAME feature to isolate configurations as we iterate on our own config’s, or try out new configs.

$NVIM_APPNAME#

Neovim executable is present at /usr/bin/nvim

  • For bash, assumes ~/.local/bin/ already exists in user’s $PATH

    Create a file ~/.local/bin/pvim and mark it executable

    mkdir -p ~/.local/bin/
touch ~/.local/bin/pvim
chmod +x ~/.local/bin/pvim

    Add the following contents to ~/.local/bin/pvim

    #/usr/bin/env bash
NVIM_APPNAME=pvim /usr/bin/nvim $@

  • For fish

    Create a function inside ~/.config/fish/config.fish

    function pvim
  NVIM_APPNAME="pvim" /usr/bin/nvim $argv
end

The path to nvim above could also be to a versioned binary, when we migrating from one version to another and do not want to break our existing setup.

/usr/bin/nvim-v0.11.5

Another example using kickstart.nvim#

Let us say we want to try kickstart.nvim without affecting our own setup.

We’ll only show the fish variant, bash can be adapted in a similar fashion.

clone to ~/.config/kickstart.nvim#
git clone https://github.com/nvim-lua/kickstart.nvim ~/.config/kickstart.nvim
create kvim function to use it#
function kvim
  # Use the minimal `kickstart.nvim` distro with a specific binary version
  NVIM_APPNAME="kickstart.nvim" /usr/bin/nvim_0.11.5 $argv
end

We now have both kvim and nvim available to use.