Setting up vim in a local environment

vim

nvim

coc

nodejs

ranger

If you are working in a linux environment without superuser privileges, you can set up vim (or nvim) and its plugins in the following way.

vim

• Compile vim 8 from source with python3 support
• Add path (~/.local/bin/vim) to local vim before the system vim path (/usr/bin/vim) in your $PATH variable

nvim

• Download the executable binary
• Copy the content (bin, lib, share) of the extracted tar to ~/.local so that it can be launched
• create .config/nvim/init.vim according to instructions and populate with appropriate lines
• run nvim and issue :checkhealth to see what does not work

Using nvim as an alias for vim

In .bashrc add

alias vim=nvim
alias vimdiff="nvim -d"

fixing Ultisnip python3 path

• Find python3 path with which python3
• Insert in .vimrc for nvim to specify the path of python3

let g:python3_host_prog = <full path from `which python3` output>

• Install pynvim using

pip3 install pynvim

• Run :checkhealth to see if there is still an issue.

nodejs

• Download nodejs binary from website

wget -c https://nodejs.org/dist/v16.13.0/node-v16.13.0-linux-x64.tar.xz

• extract and add the path of extracted location to $PATH in ~/.bashrc and source
• check node command runs
• [unnecessary] install npm package neovim using ` npm install -g neovim `

coc.nvim

• With :PlugInstall command you will get the error that the Release branch could not be found
• Go to the downloaded repository and (build and) install it with npm using

cd $HOME/.vim/plugged/coc.nvim
npm install

• Open nvim and check that coc is not showing any error
• Install language servers using :CocInstall coc-pyright

ranger

I use ranger as a browser within vim via the plugin francoiscabrol/ranger.vim. To install ranger via pip,

pip3 install ranger-fm

Issues

In the local environment, I have noticed the following issues.

• nvim takes a while to load
• the first insert mode in nvim is very slow, after that it works well
• ranger takes a while to start
  • turn off preview mode in .config/ranger