Neovim 0.11 released [LWN.net]

Version 0.11 of the Neovim text editor has been released. Notable changes in this release include simpler Language Server Protocol (LSP) client setup, improved tree-sitter performance, better emoji support, and enhancements for Neovim's embedded terminal emulator. See the release notes for a full list of changes.

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Good to see configuration improvements

Posted Mar 26, 2025 20:55 UTC (Wed) by proski (guest, #104) [Link] (2 responses)

Switching to Neovim as my main editor two years ago was one of the best choices I made in my career. With Neovim experience, I can use plain vim efficiently. Virtually every Linux install has an editor I can use, that's amazing. Using \f for formatting is very useful, I don't have to indent anything.

Yet configuring Neovim was a nightmarish experience. There are tons on guides online, they overlap partly and differ in some details. I'm supposed to install a plugin manager (there are plenty of choices), a package manager, I need to understand the difference between LSP servers and clients, and everybody says I need 5-10 plugins to get the right experience. Many plugins are discontinued and archived on Github, some have newer replacements, others don't. One plugin was archived because its author committed suicide :(

At some point I just stopped messing with configs and decided to get back to it one day. I haven't touched it since.

Good to see configuration improvements

Posted Mar 27, 2025 1:22 UTC (Thu) by DimeCadmium (subscriber, #157243) [Link]

To be honest, most of that seems true for "plain vim" as well. :)

Good to see configuration improvements

Posted Mar 27, 2025 8:13 UTC (Thu) by bluss (guest, #47454) [Link]

Using a "distribution" or configuration package such as AstroNvim is probably the recommended way to avoid having to configure all the advanced features yourself.

neovim good and neovim alternatives also good

Posted Mar 27, 2025 0:41 UTC (Thu) by jokeyrhyme (subscriber, #136576) [Link] (2 responses)

Great improvements here, yay!

For folks that are curious about the joy of a terminal editor but with much less setup required, check out https://helix-editor.com/ !

neovim good and neovim alternatives also good

Posted Mar 27, 2025 16:33 UTC (Thu) by ajmacleod (guest, #1729) [Link] (1 responses)

I tried Helix just now and found it immensely irritating. Similar enough to vi/vim to be usable, different enough to be constantly annoying. I also raised an eyebrow at the source package being the best part of ten times the size of vim's... I understand the logic behind some of the more obvious changes but when the vast majority of systems I use on a daily basis don't have hx available but have vim instead there seems little point in adding such confusion to my muscle memory.

neovim good and neovim alternatives also good

Posted Mar 30, 2025 14:52 UTC (Sun) by denials (subscriber, #3413) [Link]

Right there with you. I installed it after reading the suggestion and tried it for a few days but it seems 25 years of vim has broken me.

neovim in debian

Posted Mar 27, 2025 1:04 UTC (Thu) by dilinger (subscriber, #2867) [Link] (11 responses)

Damn, Debian *just* got 0.10 into Trixie five days ago. Every time I've tried to use fancy neovim plugins to get a nice IDE setup, the plugin stack requires a newer version of neovim than I have available.

neovim in debian

Posted Mar 27, 2025 2:08 UTC (Thu) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link] (4 responses)

Honest question...

The primary motivation for using Debian Stable seems to be that you want to just use your system instead of having to constantly fiddle with it. Yet every time I see a comment from somebody using Debian Stable, it is about how they are having to work around limitations or that they spent time fiddling with something only to find out it will not work with the packages they are using.

Is Debian Stable really less fiddling?

I hope this question does not come off wrong. I am sincerely curious to know the perspective of a real Debian Stable user.

neovim in debian

Posted Mar 27, 2025 2:32 UTC (Thu) by dilinger (subscriber, #2867) [Link]

It's a rare instance where something in debian stable didn't work for me (and to be fair, in this case debian _unstable_ also wouldn't have worked for me) on my desktop systems. I use debian stable so that things don't randomly break on my laptop, my kid's laptop, and my wife's laptops. I set them to auto-update for security updates, and things go smoothly. I have exactly 4 non-stable packages installed on my laptop (three debian-supplied backport packages - yggdrasil, yt-dlp, and smartmontools; and one dino-im package I built myself that includes a specific patch that upstream won't accept), and a flatpak for gnome errands. Otherwise, I almost never find myself wishing I had some bleeding-edge piece of software. And I appreciate that work has gone into the debian package in order to get it stable and DFSG-compliant, unlike a random flatpak or upstream-supplied binary or something.

neovim in debian

Posted Mar 27, 2025 12:03 UTC (Thu) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

Trixie is testing/unstable, not Debian stable (which is bookworm).

neovim in debian

Posted Mar 27, 2025 16:28 UTC (Thu) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link]

I made some touchscreens at home that control lights and some other appliances. They run on debian. The great thing is that I still get openssl and whatnot fixed but it won't randomly stop compiling new versions of my application because python has decided to drop yet another module for example.

They've been working fine for several years, with the occasional update when the local public transport company changed their API and I had to fix that component.

neovim in debian

Posted Mar 28, 2025 9:14 UTC (Fri) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

I use Debian stable on a Raspberry Pi. It mostly does DNS-over-HTTPS resolution for my network, but in theory it's also a media server.

I did install a few non-standard things to make that work, which wasn't particularly hard (as compared to installing any other random tarball, anyway). It is really nice being able to just install unattended-upgrades and walk away from the damn thing without having to worry about it getting pwned or some update breaking things.

neovim in debian

Posted Mar 27, 2025 14:32 UTC (Thu) by miekg (subscriber, #4403) [Link] (1 responses)

Compiling and installing your own compiled Debian package is very easy. I do this for more than a year now on my Ubuntu system. See https://miek.nl/2023/september/10/nvim-debian-pkg/

neovim in debian

Posted Mar 27, 2025 21:03 UTC (Thu) by bluss (guest, #47454) [Link]

thanks. had never heard of cpack. It's also possible - if you can use the binaries neovim publishes, to "convert" their binary releases to a .deb quite quickly.

neovim in debian

Posted Mar 28, 2025 8:48 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (2 responses)

Wonder if using the packaged plugins would be a more stable way to go, then there might be some more compatibility with the distro neovim.

neovim in debian

Posted Mar 28, 2025 16:38 UTC (Fri) by dilinger (subscriber, #2867) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah, I briefly checked into this, but I didn't see any obviously neovim packaged IDE plugins. I do see debhelper support for packaging them (via dh-vim-addons), but maybe I'm using the wrong search queries?

neovim in debian

Posted Mar 29, 2025 2:35 UTC (Sat) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

I see lots of vim-* packages but seemingly nothing for neovim yet, I guess most Debian folks who use it are used to using the neovim plugin manager and it is enough for them.

neovim in debian

Posted Mar 31, 2025 14:45 UTC (Mon) by SamuelOPH (subscriber, #107804) [Link]

I've been using the upstream-provided appimage files and it works really well on my Debian Testing.

The Debian maintainer said 0.11 won't get to Trixie due to the need for a treesitter transition and the freeze: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1101413#10