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Create A Local Neovim Lua Plugin

June 2021

Introduction

I'm starting to experiment more with Neovim plugins. Most of the directions/tutorials I found about how to set one up locally confuse me. This is what I came up with after a bunch of searching and trial and error. It uses the lazy1 plugin manager for installation.

The Steps

  1. Create the directory structure for a new_plugin.nvim plugin inside the a ~/workshop directory:

    mkdir -p ~/workshop/new_plugin.nvim/lua/new_plugin

  2. Create a .lua file at:

    ~/workshop/new_plugin.nvim/lua/new_plugin/init.lua

    With the contents:

    local M = {}

function M.setup()
    vim.keymap.set("n", "<Leader>8", function() 
      M.do_something()
    end)
end

function M.do_something()
    print("Doing Something")
end

return M

  3. Find the require('lazy').setup({}) section inside ~/.config/nvim/init.lua and add

    require('lazy').setup({
    -- all the stuff
})

    And add put this dir statement inside it like this:

    require('lazy').setup({
    { dir = "~/workshop/new_plugin.nvim" },
    -- all the other stuff
})

  4. Somewhere after the require('lazy').setup({}) stuff add this line in the ~/config.nvim/init.lua file

    (NOTE: This is only necessary if you need to do specific setup stuff. The example shows setting a hotkey, but that can be done (and I like it better) in a keymapping file)

    require('new_plugin').setup()

This particular example prints Doing Something when you hit the leader key followed by 8. Nothing spectacular there. Just a simple function to show the plugin is working.

end of line

References

This is the page where things finally clicked. It's got some extra cruft but it's what got me started.

Footnotes

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