Introduction

A starting point for Neovim that is:

• Small (~370 lines)
• Single-file
• Documented
• Modular

Kickstart.nvim targets only the latest 'stable' and latest 'nightly' of Neovim. If you are experiencing issues, please make sure you have the latest versions.

This repo is meant to be used as a starting point for a user's own configuration; remove the things you don't use and add what you miss. Please refrain from leaving comments about enabling / disabling particular languages out of the box.

Installation

• Backup your previous configuration
• Copy and paste the kickstart.nvim init.lua into $HOME/.config/nvim/init.lua
• Start Neovim (nvim) and run :PackerInstall - ignore any error message about missing plugins, :PackerInstall will fix that shortly
• Restart Neovim

If there are languages that you don't want to use, remove their configuration and notes from your init.lua after copy and pasting (for example, in the mason configuration).

Windows Installation

Installation may require installing build tools, and updating the run command for telescope-fzf-native

See telescope-fzf-native documention for more details

This requires:

• Install CMake, and the Microsoft C++ Build Tools on Windows

use {'nvim-telescope/telescope-fzf-native.nvim', run = 'cmake -S. -Bbuild -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release && cmake --build build --config Release && cmake --install build --prefix build' }

Configuration

You could directly modify the init.lua file with your personal customizations. This option is the most straightforward, but if you update your config from this repo, you may need to reapply your changes.

An alternative approach is to create a separate custom.plugins module to register your own plugins. In addition, you can handle further customizations in the /after/plugin/ directory (see :help load-plugins). See the following examples for more information. Leveraging this technique should make upgrading to a newer version of this repo easier.

Example plugins.lua

The following is an example of a plugins.lua module (located at $HOME/.config/nvim/lua/custom/plugins.lua) where you can register your own plugins.

return function(use)
  use({
    "folke/which-key.nvim",
      config = function()
        require("which-key").setup({})
      end
  })
end

Example defaults.lua

For further customizations, you can add a file in the /after/plugin/ folder (see :help load-plugins) to include your own options, keymaps, autogroups, and more. The following is an example defaults.lua file (located at $HOME/.config/nvim/after/plugin/defaults.lua).

vim.opt.relativenumber = true

vim.keymap.set('n', '<leader>sr', require('telescope.builtin').resume, { desc = '[S]earch [R]esume' })

Contribution

Pull-requests are welcome. The goal of this repo is not to create a Neovim configuration framework, but to offer a starting template that shows, by example, available features in Neovim. Some things that will not be included:

• Custom language server configuration (null-ls templates)
• Theming beyond a default colorscheme necessary for LSP highlight groups
• Lazy-loading. Kickstart.nvim should start within 40 ms on modern hardware. Please profile and contribute to upstream plugins to optimize startup time instead.

Each PR, especially those which increase the line count, should have a description as to why the PR is necessary.

FAQ

• What should I do if I already have a pre-existing neovim configuration?
  • You should back it up, then delete all files associated with it.
  • This includes your existing init.lua and the neovim files in .local which can be deleted with rm -rf ~/.local/share/nvim/