Migrating from lazy.nvim to vim.pack

Like many others who are upgrading to Neovim 0.12.0, I decided to give vim.pack a try by following the excellent guide by Evgeni Chasnovski. I did encounter a few bumps that I figured I would document here just in case others find themselves stuck.

• Symlinks - Bit more of a dummy move on my part, but I wasn’t paying attention to my symlink setup that maps my git controlled repo ~/dotfiles/nvim to ~/.config/nvim and ended up missing some new folders I created. Re-linking helped fixed this, so if you have this kind of setup keep in mind to do this!

• Multiple Folder Organization - Something I wanted to do originally is replicate the setup I had with lazy where each plugin was in it’s own file. This is possible vim.pack, but it requires using a plugin directory that is adjacent to your init.lua file. I have a slightly different structure where this style didn’t quite fit in, so I stuck with a single file setup instead.

• Lazy Loading - The guide linked at the beginning has some great tips for how you can lazy load plugins based on different events, so I would highly recommend looking at which plugins don’t need to be loaded immediately or only need to be loaded while in insert mode. I was able to shave an extra 10ms off my startup time!

Overall this resulted in a lean one file config for plugins that is only 117 lines long and has an average startup time of 35ms.

-- ============================================================================
-- Colorscheme (must load at startup)
-- ============================================================================
vim.pack.add({
	"https://github.com/stevedylandev/compline-nvim",
  'https://github.com/echasnovski/mini.nvim',
})
vim.cmd.colorscheme('compline')

-- ============================================================================
-- Mini.nvim — startup modules
-- ============================================================================

local win_config = function()
  local height = math.floor(0.618 * vim.o.lines)
  local width = math.floor(0.618 * vim.o.columns)
  return {
    anchor = 'NW',
    height = height,
    width = width,
    row = math.floor(0.5 * (vim.o.lines - height)),
    col = math.floor(0.5 * (vim.o.columns - width)),
  }
end

require("mini.pick").setup({
  mappings = {
    choose_marked = '<C-y>',
    move_down     = '<C-j>',
    move_up       = '<C-k>',
  },
  window = { config = win_config }
})

vim.api.nvim_set_hl(0, "MiniPickMatchCurrent",
  { bg = vim.g.terminal_color_8
  })

require('mini.icons').setup()
vim.api.nvim_set_hl(0, 'MiniIconsAzure', { fg = vim.g.terminal_color_12 })
vim.api.nvim_set_hl(0, 'MiniIconsBlue', { fg = vim.g.terminal_color_4 })
vim.api.nvim_set_hl(0, 'MiniIconsCyan', { fg = vim.g.terminal_color_6 })
vim.api.nvim_set_hl(0, 'MiniIconsGreen', { fg = vim.g.terminal_color_2 })
vim.api.nvim_set_hl(0, 'MiniIconsGrey', { fg = vim.g.terminal_color_8 })
vim.api.nvim_set_hl(0, 'MiniIconsOrange', { fg = vim.g.terminal_color_3 })
vim.api.nvim_set_hl(0, 'MiniIconsPurple', { fg = vim.g.terminal_color_5 })
vim.api.nvim_set_hl(0, 'MiniIconsRed', { fg = vim.g.terminal_color_1 })
vim.api.nvim_set_hl(0, 'MiniIconsYellow', { fg = vim.g.terminal_color_11 })

require('mini.diff').setup({
  view = {
    style = vim.go.number and 'sign' or 'number',

    signs = {
      add = "+",
      change = "~",
      delete = "-",
      topdelete = "",
      changedelete = "▎",
      untracked = "+"
    },

    priority = 199,
  },
})
require('mini.statusline').setup()
require('mini.extra').setup()

-- ============================================================================
-- Deferred — loads right after startup via vim.schedule()
-- ============================================================================
vim.schedule(function()
  vim.pack.add({
    "https://github.com/christoomey/vim-tmux-navigator",
  })

  require("mini.comment").setup({
    mappings = {
      comment = 'gb',
      comment_visual = 'gb',
      textobject = 'gb'
    }
  })

  require('mini.surround').setup({
    mappings = {
      replace = 'cs', -- Replace surrounding
    },
  })

  require('mini.files').setup({
    mappings = {
      close      = '<ESC>',
      go_in_plus = '<CR>'
    }
  })
end)

-- ============================================================================
-- Lazy — loads on InsertEnter
-- ============================================================================
vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd('InsertEnter', { once = true, callback = function()
  require("mini.completion").setup({
    mappings = {
      scroll_down = '<C-j>',
      scroll_up = '<C-k>',
    },
  })

  local gen_loader = require('mini.snippets').gen_loader
  require('mini.snippets').setup({
    snippets = {
      gen_loader.from_lang(),
    },
  })
  MiniSnippets.start_lsp_server()
end })

All of my dotfiles can be found at github.com/stevedylandev/dotfiles!