I’ve been a Vim and Neovim user for a long time now. From the very beginning, around 2003-2004, I learned about “sharpening the saw” (see Part 3 from Bram’s “Seven habits of effective text editing”). And I still find it both interesting and fun to continue sharpening the saw. This is evident from my dotnvim, which has seen more than 20 the last couple of months.

One of the things I really like about Neovim is that it embraces new ideas and improvements to the editor. When I stay on Neovim nightly and follow the work and progress of the development, I get to test these new features as they arrive. In the early stages, they are experimental and tend to change somewhat until they land in a versioned release.

For instance, during the last few months, Neovim has adopted and implemented the :restart Ex command 0. Before this, restarting meant actually quitting the editor and restarting it from the terminal. I do restart Neovim frequently e.g. when I am configuring the editor itself, because it is sometimes the best or only way to reload configuration.

In the first iteration of :restart, it didn’t properly save and restore the session automatically. It also didn’t have a default mapping. So I created a mapping for it in early April:

vim.keymap.set("n", "<leader>rr", function()
  local session = vim.fn.stdpath "state" .. "/restart_session.vim"
  vim.cmd("mksession! " .. vim.fn.fnameescape(session))
  vim.cmd("restart source " .. vim.fn.fnameescape(session))
end)

In a later update to Neovim, :restart started automatically saving and restoring the session, so I could simplify:

vim.keymap.set("n", "<leader>rr", "<cmd>restart<cr>")

Then Neovim got a default map: ZR. I realized this was better than my own <leader>rr, so I removed it in July. Now I use ZZ to write and quit the current buffer, ZQ to immediately exit Neovim, and ZR to restart it. Neat!

And this is only one of many improvements made to Neovim since v0.12 was released in March. All the main changes are documented, see news. In addition to the :restart command, I’ve also embraced the new package manager vim.pack (early April as well).

These days I’m very much looking forward to testing the new feature where Lua functions/closures can be assigned to “func” and “expr” options 1. This means I can rewrite expressions like

vim.wo.foldexpr = "v:lua.vim.treesitter.foldexpr()"

-- to
vim.wo.foldexpr = vim.treesitter.foldexpr

-- or
vim.wo.foldexpr = function() return vim.v.lnum == 1 and '>1' or '1' end

I do maintain a few custom foldexpr functions and similar, so this will allow me to improve and clean up my config. Cool stuff!