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Emacs to Neovim

My move from Emacs to LunarVim

The context

I have been using Emacs for about 20 years. I have been using it as my main editor. I have used it for writing code and writing blog posts.

I especially love the rectangle feature, that I extensively used for commenting text up to reformat data

On the other hand, despite all the good it is told about org-mode and magit, I never really used them.

The extremum of my love for Emacs was when language servers landed in (I dont remember the year), but I could then have decent code completion.

The trigger

In 2023, arrived (in my life!) Github Copilot. I was amazed by the power of the tool. I am still.

When looked at the Github repository of the Copilot team, I saw that NeoVim was part of the supported editors, with the "copilot.vim" plugin.

I was curious to see how it works: I installed NeoVim and the plugin.

The solution

After about one month of trial, I made my decision: I switch to Neovim.

But when I practized Neovim, I heard about LunarVim and tried it: immediate adoption.

The few things I had to tune were:

  • The installation of Github Copilot
  • The setting of Alt+Enter to accept the suggestion of Copilot
  • The setting to use a light theme
  • The setting to have a more visible cursor
This is the code for that: 
 lvim.plugins = {
  { "catppuccin/nvim", name = "catppuccin", priority = 1000 },
  { "github/copilot.vim",
    config = function()
      vim.keymap.set('i', '', 'copilot#Accept("\\")', {
          expr = true,
          replace_keycodes = false
        })
      vim.g.copilot_no_tab_map = true
    end,
  },
}

lvim.colorscheme = "catppuccin-latte"
lvim.builtin.bufferline.active = false

vim.api.nvim_command("au VimEnter,WinEnter,BufWinEnter * setlocal cursorline")
vim.api.nvim_command("au VimEnter,WinEnter,BufWinEnter * setlocal cursorcolumn")

-- In NeoVim, the  mapping is for something I dont know. I need to unmap it.
vim.api.nvim_del_keymap("i", "")

-- Enable intelephense
-- Make sure "gd" is mapped to "vim.lsp.buf.definition()" and "gr" is mapped to "vim.lsp.buf.references()"
require'lspconfig'.intelephense.setup{
  cmd = { "intelephense", "--stdio" },
  on_attach = function(client, bufnr)
    vim.api.nvim_buf_set_keymap(bufnr, "n", "gd", "lua vim.lsp.buf.definition()", { noremap = true, silent = true })
    vim.api.nvim_buf_set_keymap(bufnr, "n", "gr", "lua vim.lsp.buf.references()", { noremap = true, silent = true })
  end
}

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