Pistonite VM

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Neovim ​

Neovim is my editor of choice for rapid-race development.

Dependencies ​

Install the following dependencies from cargo

bash
cargo install ripgrep websocat fd-find

Install ​

WARNING

zig is strongly strongly recommended for Windows for compiling treesitter, as it is a C-compatible compiler. Otherwise you need to figure out how to make MSVC available through the command line, which is not convenient.

Arch Linux:

  1. nvim should be bootstrapped during the full install. If not, you can install with
    bash
    sudo pacman -Syu neovim
  2. Setup aliases
    bash
    echo "alias=vi,vim:which:nvim" >> ~/dotbin/extra/portable/link
dotbin-link

Windows:

  1. Download the latest stable release from https://github.com/neovim/neovim/releases. Save nvim-win64.zip to the Downloads directory
  2. Extract it
    powershell
    rm -rf ~/dotbin/extra/portable/nvim-win64
7z x -y ~/Downloads/nvim-win64.zip "-o$HOME/dotbin/extra/portable"
  3. Configure link
    powershell
    Add-Content -Path ~/dotbin/extra/portable/link -Value "alias=vi,vim:shim:nvim-win64/bin/nvim.exe`nshim:nvim-win64/bin/win32yank.exe`nshim:nvim-win64/bin/xxd.exe"
sudo dotbin-link

    TIP

    Run sudo dotbin-link --force for updating!

  4. Exclude nvim from Windows Defender.
    powershell
    Add-MpPreference -ExclusionPath ~/dotbin
Add-MpPreference -ExclusionProcess nvim

    WARNING

    Run as admin!

WARNING

Verify installation with

bash
nvim --version

Packer ​

Package manager for Neovim

  • Windows:
    powershell
    rm -rf $env:LOCALAPPDATA\nvim-data
mkdir -p "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\nvim-data\site\pack\packer\start"
git clone https://github.com/wbthomason/packer.nvim "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\nvim-data\site\pack\packer\start\packer.nvim"
  • Arch Linux:
    bash
    yay -Syu nvim-packer-git

Config ​

INFO

I made my configs from 2 tutorials:

(And of course copying from the examples provided by the plugins)

WARNING

Make sure to setup dotbin for getting the config

bash
dotbin-cfg nvim

INFO

To copy the config in the other direction (i.e. from the local machine to dotbin/dotconfig)

bash
dotbin-cfg nvim --reverse

Install the plugins ​

Start neovim

bash
nvim

You will see some errors because the plugins are not installed. It's OK. Press Shift+G to go to the bottom and Enter to continue. Then, run the following command to install them

vim
:PackerSync

Restart neovim and you should be good.

GitHub Copilot ​

If you have GitHub Copilot, run the following to set it up

vim
:Copilot setup

Then follow on-screen instructions.

You can use :Copilot status to check at anytime if it is enabled

Integration Config ​

There are certain integration options that can be configured in nvim/lua/integrations.lua. (The nvim directory is in ~/.config on Linux and %LOCALAPPDATA% on Windows). These options enable small differences in machines and won't be overwritten when pulling new config changes.

Yank to host clipboard ​

dotbin has a utility wsclip that starts a websocket server that copies inbound messages into clipboard. This is useful for copying text from headless VM to the host. All you need is setup

bash
export HOST_MACHINE_IP=192.168.xxx.xxx

You can see the autocommand in lua/keys.lua that uses websocat to send it over to the host. On windows, it uses powershell's Set-Clipboard command so you don't need to do extra setup.

Currently, it doesn't support copying directly from Linux to system clipboard. This should change when I get a real Linux machine.

Update ​

To update the config, run the configuration script again

bash
dotbin-cfg nvim

To update the plugins/packages/tools, run

:PackerSync

After that, also update treesitter and Mason tools

:TSUpdate
:MasonUpdate

Key mappings ​

  • See here for the raw key mappings

Language-specific LSP Setups ​

Works out-of-box with Mason ​

The following should work mostly out-of-box when installing through Mason:

  • Rust: rust-analyzer
  • TypeScript/ECMAScript: typescript-language-server and eslint-lsp
  • Python: pyright

C/C++ (clangd) ​

  1. Install it through Mason
  2. Your build system must produce a compile-commands.json
  3. Create .clangd in the root of the projects with the following, changing the path accordingly
    yaml
    CompileFlags:
  CompilationDatabase: ./path/to/directory/with/compile-commands.json
  4. If additional configuration is needed, follow https://clangd.llvm.org/config.html#compileflags

Java (jdtls) ​

DANGER

This configuration is experimental and unstable

  1. DO NOT install it through Mason. Instead, download from https://download.eclipse.org/jdtls/milestones
  2. Extract JDTLS from the download from step 1. Put it in some permanent location, then set the ECLIPSE_JDTLS_HOME variable to that folder.

TIP

I have a folder, say E:\Eclipse (on windows), that I put jdtls as well as all my jdks.

  1. You also need a decently new version of JDK. Install the latest from https://jdk.java.net/ or from package manager. At the time of writing, the latest is JDK 21
  2. Set ECLIPSE_JDK_HOME to the JDK you will be using for JDTLS

TIP

Both ECLIPSE_JDTLS_HOME and ECLIPSE_JDK_HOME are referenced in the nvim config, so the config can be cross-plat.

  1. For every runtime you want to use, set the JDK<version>_HOME to the path of the JDK. For example JDK8_HOME for JavaSE-1.8 and JDK21_HOME for JavaSE-21. JDTLS will detect the runtime to use from .classpath, then use this env to find the Java installation.