An editor built up from nothing, on purpose

A Neovim distribution would have been faster. LazyVim or NvChad would have had highlighting and LSP working in an afternoon. I started from an empty init.lua instead and wrote the plugins, colourscheme, keymaps and LSP wiring myself. It took longer, and the payoff shows up when something breaks: I know what every line in the config is for.

Loading plugins on demand

Every plugin declares its own load trigger through lz.n: a keypress, a filetype, a command, or eagerly if it genuinely has to be.

return {
  "nvim-treesitter",
  event = "DeferredUIEnter",
}

return {
  "fastaction.nvim",
  keys = { { "<leader>a", function() require("fastaction").code_action() end } },
}

Nothing pays a startup cost until something asks for it. Each entry in the plugin list says when it loads, so the startup time is something you can reason about instead of measure and shrug at.

If you are starting from scratch, set this up early. Retrofitting lazy loading onto a config with thirty eagerly loaded plugins means working out, one at a time, what each plugin actually needs to be loaded for.

A colourscheme and a grammar

The colourscheme (gxvjbox) is a gruvbox-derived palette I wrote from scratch: a set of hex values, applied to each highlight group by hand. The same base16 table is used outside Neovim, for the terminal, the file manager and the bar, so those tools agree on colours without anyone copying values between five config formats.

The less common piece is tree-sitter support for a couple of personal file formats I use for my own project files. I wrote the grammar: a compiled C parser, syntax queries, and a topiary formatting query, all in neovimConfig/ next to the rest of the editor config. A distribution cannot ship that, because the formats only exist for me.

Pointing the language server at this flake

The Nix language server here is not only configured for Nix syntax. It is pointed at this flake's own evaluated option set, so completion on a NixOS option comes from this repository's module tree rather than from generic nixpkgs documentation:

options.nixos.expr = '(builtins.getFlake (toString ./.)).nixosConfigurations.amal.options'

Swap amal for your own nixosConfigurations name. Once that line is correct, writing Nix inside Neovim gives you completions for your own custom modules, which is the main reason I keep the editor config in the same repo as the system config.

Where this lives: One flake for every machine I run