What it is
Neovim is a fork of Vim, the keyboard-driven text editor, rebuilt for extensibility. It keeps Vim’s modal editing, where you switch between moving around, inserting text and running commands, and adds a built-in Lua scripting engine, a language server client for code completion and diagnostics, and Tree-sitter for accurate syntax highlighting.
Why it’s here
- Fast everywhere. It runs in any terminal, locally or over SSH, and opens instantly.
- An IDE when you want one. Language servers give it go-to-definition, completion and inline errors for most languages.
- Yours to shape. The whole configuration is Lua in
~/.config/nvim.
On CoreDesktop
CoreDesktop installs Neovim from pacman and, if you don’t already have a configuration, clones kickstart.nvim into ~/.config/nvim. Kickstart is a single, well-commented init.lua that sets up a plugin manager, fuzzy finding, language servers and a color scheme. The first time you run nvim, it downloads its plugins.
An existing ~/.config/nvim is left alone. Neovim is also the editor the eff alias opens: it fuzzy-finds a file with fzf and opens the one you pick.