2023 Migrate from packer to lazy#

2023-12-29#

Rewrite: Migrate from packer to lazy

Summary#

  • Complete rewrite using lazy, with almost the same set of plugins.

  • Got rid of some of the plugins, installed via packer, which I never used

  • Also went through the options and revised them.

  • Modular plugin specification and configuration as per lazy

  • Use which-key directly to setup keymaps where possible

  • Disabled treesitter based highlight as it was terribly slow when scrolling.

TODO#

  • Options

    • formatoptions needs work to automatically move to next line depending upon file type.

    • filetype specific shiftwidth

  • Lazy

    • Have a central place to specify which plugins to exclude from being used.

    • Also find out better about event = "VeryLazy" setup so that I can further delay when the plugins get loaded.

      I am currently using vim.defer_fn() for setting up treesitter, something which I copied from nvim-lua/kickstart.nvim.

  • colourschemes

    I would like to just specify the primary colourschemes which I want, and it should automatically get a 1000 priority with the rest of the plugins being loaded on event = "VeryLazy".

Lazy setup#

With lazy, all the plugins are specified in lua/plugins/spec folder, and most of them also configured alongside the spec.

For some of the plugins, the configuration has been extracted out into lua/plugins/config folder. I did this for either of the following reasons

  • A plugin specific config was getting quite large, or I intended it to grow larger in the future.

  • lsp configuration. I would quickly like to navigate to a specific part using telescope files.

Import ordering#

For a plugin configuration, where another plugin gets used, I’ve meticulously specified the dependency so that I don’t ever have to use pcall(). This makes the setup flow for a plugin straightforward, but perhaps at the expense of some lazy loading speed.

which-key is a plugin which is a dependency for almost any plugin where I’m setting a keymap in the configuration.

Directory structure#

lua/plugins/
├── config
│   ├── format.lua
│   ├── lsp
│   │   ├── clangd.lua
│   │   ├── init.lua
│   │   ├── lua_ls.lua
│   │   └── vanilla.lua
│   ├── neorg.lua
│   ├── snippets.lua
│   ├── telescope.lua
│   └── treesitter.lua
└── spec
    ├── buffers_tabs.lua
    ├── cardio.lua
    ├── cmp.lua
    ├── colourschemes.lua
    ├── editing.lua
    ├── filenav.lua
    ├── git.lua
    ├── linting.lua
    ├── looks.lua
    ├── lsp.lua
    ├── luasnip.lua
    ├── neorg.lua
    ├── neovim.lua
    ├── nifty_lsp.lua
    ├── telescope.lua
    ├── tmux.lua
    ├── treesitter.lua
    ├── trouble.lua
    ├── ui.lua
    └── which-key.lua

Which-Key#

The key mappings are now set via which-key directly wherever possible. This lets us have proper labels with a heirarchical setup. I have tried to be consistent with using a single letter for a set of related mappings. This was however only possible rouhgly 80% of the times.

Some of the most frequent mappings are triggered via <leader><leader>

  • <leader><leader>b - Open telescope fuzzy find on the directory of the current buffer.

  • <leader><leader>d - Open diagnostics under cursor in a float.

  • <leader><leader>t - Toggle last tab

  • <leader><leader>w - Open top level WhichKey

In addition, a set of mappings I think I’m going to use a lot is ]t and [t to navigate to next and previous tabs.

Oil#

A great plugin to navigate and edit files in bulk. This specially replaces my workflow of going to the shell, touch newfile.md and then opening it up in Neovim.

Instead, I now do <leader>oo to open Oil in a floating windows, and edit the buffer to create/rename files.

<leader>ol to open Oil as a regular buffer.

Conform.nvim#

New plugin to auto-format a buffer on save, also on demand via <leader><leader>f.

Gitsigns#

This is not a new plugin, but I wasn’t really using it in the older setup. I now have keymaps triggered via <leader>h, and I’m hoping that I use it more often.

Same as before#

telescope, lsp, tresitter, completion and most of the other configuration remained the same, with some minor changes.