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Questions and Answers

This section groups the answers to all the questions I came up to when learning nvim.

Custom functions to add

  • Whenever the cursor is over an item, create a mapping to replace the word by another.

What is the difference between Telescope and fzf?

  • Telescope is nvim-centric. It uses ripgrep for some of its functionalities.
  • FZF is a general command line tool to do fuzzy search.

What is the difference between buffers, windows, panes and tabs

  • Buffers: Space in memory where a file is allocated.
  • Window: A portion of the screen in which a buffer is displayed. When you split your window, you create another window. Another view to a buffer.
  • Panes: The same as windows.
  • Tab: A tab is a window layout. In one tab you may have a single window and in a second tab you may have two vertical windows

How to disable plugins?

Create a file disabled.lua in ~/.config/nvim/lua/plugins/ folder.

return {
    {"windwp/nvim-spectre", enabled=false},
}

How to know something is wrong?

Use the Checkhealth tool

In command mode, type checkhealth. A series of diagnostics will be made and it may shed a light in some hairy problem you are having.

How to configuring pylsp

Python Language Server relies on several packages. One of them is pycodestyle, which defines some formatting rules such as the maximum line length.

The pylsp will look on the default configuration files of these packages. For pycodestyle, that will be ~/.config/pycodestyle. To change the maximum length, you edit this file to look something similar to

[pycodestyle]
max-line-length = 100

After the change, you can restart the LSP server by typing: :LspRestart.

Here is more information about pycodestyle configuration.

How to paste from clipboard?

It seems that I need to have a plugin or something. In command mode, type :help clipboard for more information.

On Ubuntu, I installed xclip and that solved my issue of copying from NVim and pasting into another program.

:checkhealth

This command helped me figure out the solution for this problem.

How to get icons in the terminal

You need to patch some font with icons. There are some instructions described here.

After downloading the Hack font and storing them in /usr/share/fonts/ttf, I've used the docker image nerdfonts/patcher to create the patched version of the font.

docker run -v /usr/share/fonts/ttf:/in -v /usr/share/fonts/ttf/patched:/out nerdfonts/patcher