VSCode Neovim setup

I recently switched over to using the vscode-neovim extension for VSCode.

What wasn’t obvious though was how to get a plugin manager and plugins / vim customisations working.

I’ll add here quickly my plugins setup as I’m using vim-surround, and a bunch of Tim Pope plugins:

• vim-sensible
• vim-surround
• vim-repeat
• vim-unimpaired
• vim-commentary

I’m on Linux / Ubuntu 22.04, with nvim installed via apt with ppa-neovim/unstable – you need this to get the current required nvim v0.8+.

I moved from Vim to Neovim and I still use my .vimrc and amazingly this kind of setup seems to work with vscode-neovim too.

As per the :help nvim-from-vim have the following ~/.config/nvim/init.vim:

This happily loads my ~/.vimrc file for terminal nvim and then loads ~/.vimrc.vscode for vscode-neovim – which also appears to load:

1. It sets my leader to <space>
2. It loads Plug
3. It loads my custom key mappings
4. It loads vim-surround and and vim-repeat
   1. I know it loads these because I have a command map <leader>' ysiw'
   2. This puts single quotes around the current word
   3. This works (so vim-surround works)
   4. I can then ‘repeat’ my adding quotes with . which means vim-repeat is working in combination with it.

I have massively stripped my .vimrc file down and renamed it to ~/.vimrc.vscode:

Some interesting things that do work:

• vim-plug works!
• Basically it’s just really really cool that you can use a .vimrc
  • This means almost tons of remaps should work
• :buffers works but it’s kind of ugly
• :nohlsearch works (removing the highlight)
• :vsplit works and moving with <C-w>[hjkl]

Lots of things don’t work like:

• I got a conflict between my vim-plug config for VSCode and for neovim
  • By running :PlugClean inside VSCode this wiped all my neovim vim-plug directories
  • Effectively I think this means its better to maintain your plugins via neovim
  • Then use a subset within VSCode
• preview, quickfix and location windows
  • so vim-fugitive won’t work
• I don’t think :windo diffthis works
• You have the same problem as with VSCode Vim that undoing all changes doesn’t get rid of the file ‘dirty bit’ so you have to save it to fully undo
• :bd doesn’t work as you expect – you need to use :q instead
• I found the :e <type file path> didn’t work with auto-complete beyond the current directory – just use Ctrl + P instead.
• There is no command history – you can’t use the up arrow to go to previous ex commands that you typed – I’m surprised about this so maybe there is a config setting somewhere Ctrl + N/Ctrl + P are used instead of up/down

I’ll try to list more as I go further.

For a couple of hours spent setting it up and to have 90% of the plugins I need working is really great.

Until I can get fugitive and vim diffs (in combination with fugitive) working I will still want to use terminal nvim, but that fits quite easily into my coding process for now.