Pre-installation:

• My choice of terminal on my M1 Macbook Air is iTerm2
• In iTerm2 go to Preferences > General > Selection and activate Allow terminal applications to access clipboard
• In iTerm2 go to Preferences > Profile > Keys and toggle set the left option key to to Esc+
  • This is used for my window navigation keybindings that use the Mac option key

Pre-Installation

• node.js is required for CoC
• pip install pynvim --upgrade

Installation

• Install neovim
  • brew install neovim
• It is worth installing node’s neovim package with npm install -g neovim if you will be working with it
• Install a vim plugin manager, I use vim-plug which can be installed with:

  sh -c 'curl -fLo "${XDG_DATA_HOME:-$HOME/.local/share}"/nvim/site/autoload/plug.vim --create-dirs \
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim'

• Open up the neovim config file at ~/.config/nvim/init.vim
  • Set up the plugin section by adding

  call plug#begin("~/.vim/plugged")
  " Plugin Section
  call plug#end()

  • Configuring the init.vim file is outside of the scope of this post, my configuration will be dissected in another
  • When new plugins have been installed run the command nvim +PlugInstall from the terminal shell

Plugins

Airline

• To get a great looking status bar showing important information inside nvim, you can install the vim-airline plugin
• Add Plug 'vim-airline/vim-airline-themes' to your nvim config
  • This is highly configurable and often configured to your preference

VimTex

• Vim-Airline’s vimtex plugin word count is not accurate
  • A better word count is provided by vimtex itself, I run the VimtexCountWords command on every file save of a .tex file via my config file

CoC

• For autocompletion I use a plugin called coc.nvim which stands for Conquerer of Completion
• CoC requires node.js to be installed, this can be done with:
  curl -sL install-node.now.sh/release | bash
• Install CoC by adding Plug 'neoclide/coc.nvim', {'branch': 'release'} to the plugin section of your nvim config

CoC Completion

• In order to use CoC completion, you also need a Language Server for each filetype you want completion for
• To install a language server, run :CocInstall and the name of the server you want
• For example: I autocomplete Python files using coc-python, which I installed by running:
  :CocInstall coc-python inside neovim
  • coc-pyright is more up to date (coc-python) is archived, but it does not have method definitions (function documentation)
  • I use my own forked version of coc-python that removes the annoying Python interpreter name in the status bar

CoC Linting

• CoC also allows for linting, the checking of programmatic and stylistic errors in your code
  • Uses pylint by default, I installed flake8 through pip instead
• I needed to show nvim where my Python3 binary was installed (I use Pyenv) for linting to work, by adding the line let g:python3_host_prog = '/Users/rnash/.pyenv/shims/python' to my config file
• Import errors appear when editing a file that I am not in the directory of! cd to the folder containing them and no errors are shown
  • I.e. if I define a stack class in stack.py and implement a stack with some operations in stack_impl.py in the same folder, an missingImportError is reported unless I am in the directory containing these files

CoC Formatting

• When editing Python code I find it is easier to maintain through the use of a formatter, this is a tool that automatically indents and spaces out code according to a style of your choosing
• My choice of formatter for Python is called black and can be installed by running pip install black
  • Note that it may be better practice to install this on a per user basis by omitting sudo and adding the --user flag
  • There are some stylistic choices for code structure I prefer over what black uses, it is worth finding a formatter you like

coc-settings.json

• For all of these CoC options to work, I needed to add the following lines to my CoC configuration file, located at /.config/nvim/coc-settings.json

{
  "python.jediEnabled": false,
  "python.hideInterpreterName": true,
  "python.analysis.diagnosticEnabled": true,
  "python.linting.enabled": true,
  "python.linting.pylintEnabled": false,
  "python.linting.flake8Enabled": true,
  "python.formatting.provider": "black",
  "python.formatting.blackPath": "/Users/rnash/.pyenv/shims/black",
  "python.formatting.blackArgs": ["--line-length", "90"],
  "coc.preferences.formatOnType": true,
  "coc.preferences.formatOnSaveFiletypes": ["python"]
}

Syntax Highlighting

• For some reason coc-python does not work with coc-highlight, instead I use the plugin semshi for Python syntax highlighting
• Installed via: Plug 'numirias/semshi', {'do': ':UpdateRemotePlugins'}
• Semshi color scheme is not great with Solarized

Notes

• Running python files from within Neovim’s terminal (using :w !Python % etc) does not work for parsing input - EOF error
  • Instead use the te command, e.g. :te python my_file.py
• I am happy with my current nvim setup but it has required a lot of troubleshooting and it requires a deprecated plugin for CoC, I have been able to achieve the same functionality in VSCode without the headaches which I will document in another post.