Finally happy with my init.vim

I’ve been tinkering with my init.vim (.vimrc for Neovim) for a while, and I’m finally happy with it.

Initially I started with vanilla Neovim and added plugins and tweaks bit by bit.

However, before long, I realised that I probably wanted a combination of plugins that someone had already put together before.

Ultimate Vim Configuration

At first, I went with the modestly titled Ultimate Vim configuration, but I didn’t like some of the keybindings.

Vim Bootstrap

Next, I tried Vim Bootstrap, which is well documented. Of course, I immediately added plugins to local_bundles.vim and some of my own tweaks to local_init.vim, which worked well, but it still left me with some problems:

1. I had to jump between Vim Bootstrap’s default files and my custom files in order to work out where a configuration was defined.
2. My primary configuration file, init.vim contained a lot of plugins and behaviours that I either didn’t use or, worse, had to override in my local files.

What I wanted was something in which all my plugins were in the same place, clearly documented, and in which all the keybindings and tweaks were organised.

For example, if I wanted to look at my ALE linters and fixers, I wanted them all in one place, not scattered across two 500-line files; rather, I wanted everything to do with ALE configuration to be in a file called ale.vim.

A Combined Approach

I created two folders for core and custom Vim configurations, and a shell script to merge them into a single init.vim.

Each .vim file contains only the configurations that pertain to its subject, i.e. plugins.vim contains all the plugins, ale.vim everything to do with ALE, etc.

Most of the core configurations are nothing more than the disassembled Vim Bootstrap init.vim, and the custom configarations are also mostly from Vim Bootstrap, but organised into individual files that I can easily navigate and modify.

Core and Custom Vimrcs

• ~/.config/nvim/vimrcs_core/
• ~/.config/nvim/vimrcs_custom/

Core Vimrcs

$ ls vimrcs_core
header.vim  keybindings.vim  plugins.vim

Custom Vimrcs

$ ls vimrcs_custom/
abbreviations.vim         indentations_tabs_whitespaces.vim  session_management.vim
ale.vim                   javascript.vim                     silver_searcher.vim
autocomd_functions.vim    jedi-vim.vim                       tagbar.vim
buffers_tabs_windows.vim  markdown.vim                       terminal.vim
copy_paste_cut.vim        nerdtree.vim                       textobj-rubyblock.vim
emmet.vim                 polyglot.vim                       typescript.vim
encoding.vim              python.vim                         ultisnips.vim
fzf.vim                   ripgrep.vim                        vim-airline.vim
general_settings.vim      rspec.vim                          visualbell.vim
git.vim                   ruby_doc_command.vim               visual_mode.vim
grep.vim                  ruby.vim                           visual_settings.vim
html.vim                  search.vim

Shell Script

~/.config/nvim/generate_neovim_init.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash

nvimDir="${HOME}/.config/nvim"
vimrcCoreDir="${nvimDir}/vimrcs_core"
vimrcCustomDir="${nvimDir}/vimrcs_custom"
initFile="${nvimDir}/init.vim"

function appendToInit() {
  myDir=$1
  vimFiles=`ls ${myDir}`

  for f in "${myDir}/*"
  do
    cat ${f} >> ${initFile}
  done

  for f in ${vimFiles}
  do
    echo ${f}
  done

  echo
  echo "Files added from ${myDir}"
  echo
}

mv ${initFile} "${initFile}.bak"
touch ${initFile}

appendToInit ${vimrcCoreDir}
appendToInit ${vimrcCustomDir}