My notes on using Neovim and Vim

The contents of my commented init.vim are of interest to no one but me. Just need a convenient place for this info. This might help you learn where to put your init.vim, though.

• For installation instructions, see Installing on Ubuntu 18.04

Configuring with init.vim

Neovim is pretty much compatible with Vim. Vim looks for the configuration file .vimrc in a special location on startup. Neovim looks for init.vim.

Location of init.vim on MacOS/OSX (Neovim .vimrc equivalent)

Neovim puts its MacOS .vimrc equivalent in $HOME/.config/nvim/init.vim

So, on a new MacOS install, you'd do this to configure the Neovim init.vim file:

# Create the directory
mkdir -p $HOME/.config/nvim/
# Edit or create the file
nvim $HOME/.config/nvim/init.vim

Location of init.vim on Windows (Neovim .vimrc equivalent for Windows)

Neovim puts its Windows .vimrc equivalent in %LOCALAPPDATA%\nvim

The nvim version of .vimrc is named init.vim and goes in this directory: mkdir %LOCALAPPDATA%\nvim

So, on a new Windows install, you'd do this to configure the Neovim init.vim file:

C:\> nvim %LOCALAPPDATA%\nvim\init.vim

To enable Pasting from the Windows System clipboard, add this to init.vim

" Make sure you have this in init.vim, then paste using Shift+Insert
" Paste with <Shift> + <Insert>
imap <S-Insert> <C-R>

Downloading a single file (init.vim) from GitHub using curl

I know you'd never do anything this sloppy or lazy, but I would. You can download init.vim straight from this repo as shown using curl:

# -L means follow redirects
# -O means use only the base filename, strip off the rest of the pathname 
curl -L -O https://raw.github.com/tomcam/neovim/master/init.vim

You can do the same with wget:

 wget https://raw.github.com/tomcam/neovim/master/init.vim --output-document ~/.config/init.vim

Vim

vimrc on MacOS/Linux, etc.

The Vim configuration file .vimrc lives in ~/.vimrc. To edit:

vim ~/.vimrc

vimrc on Windows

The Vim configuration file .vimrc lives in vim %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%\.vimrc:

vim %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%\.vimrc

Get this vimrc on Windows:

: Change to the home directory, where
: Vim expects to find the .vimrc config file.
cd %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%
: Copy an example Neovim file to the current directory 
: (this one is compatible with Vim)
curl -L -O https://raw.github.com/tomcam/neovim/master/init.vim
: Rename the Neovim config file to Vim's config file name.
ren init.vim .vimrc

Most of this configuration works on classic Vim, too.

You can use this config file with Vim, which expects it

# Copy the init.vim file from GitHub to
# a file named ~/.vimrc.
wget https://raw.github.com/tomcam/neovim/master/init.vim --output-document ~/.vimrc