Neovim Installation Guide

Neovim is a modern fork of Vim with better performance, built-in LSP support, and Lua configuration.

Installation

Ubuntu/Debian

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y neovim

Fedora

sudo dnf install -y neovim

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S neovim

From Official Release (Latest)

wget https://github.com/neovim/neovim/releases/download/v0.10.0/nvim-linux64.tar.gz
sudo tar -xzf nvim-linux64.tar.gz -C /opt
sudo ln -s /opt/nvim-linux64/bin/nvim /usr/local/bin/nvim

Via AppImage

wget https://github.com/neovim/neovim/releases/download/v0.10.0/nvim.appimage
chmod +x nvim.appimage
./nvim.appimage

Verification

nvim --version

Basic Configuration

Create ~/.config/nvim/init.lua:

-- Enable syntax highlighting
vim.cmd('syntax on')

-- Enable line numbers
vim.opt.number = true
vim.opt.relativenumber = true

-- Enable mouse support
vim.opt.mouse = 'a'

-- Enable incremental search
vim.opt.incsearch = true

-- Highlight search results
vim.opt.hlsearch = true

-- Case insensitive search
vim.opt.ignorecase = true
vim.opt.smartcase = true

-- Enable indent guides
vim.opt.autoindent = true
vim.opt.smartindent = true
vim.opt.shiftwidth = 2
vim.opt.tabstop = 2

-- Enable clipboard
vim.opt.clipboard = 'unnamedplus'

-- Enable line wrapping
vim.opt.wrap = true

-- Enable visual line navigation
vim.keymap.set('n', 'j', 'gj')
vim.keymap.set('n', 'k', 'gk')

Basic Commands

Command Action
nvim file Open file
:w Save
:q Quit
:wq Save and quit
Space Leader key (default)
Ctrl+p Fuzzy finder (with plugin)
:Lazy Package manager
:Mason LSP installer