Installation

Requirements

• Neovim >= 0.12
• A Nerd Font for icons along with a compatible terminal.
• git, fd, ripgrep, a C compiler (for treesitter parsers)

Neovim: Platform install commands

macOS

brew install neovim ripgrep fd

Ubuntu / Debian

apt install neovim ships an outdated version on most releases. Use the Neovim PPA, an AppImage, or bob to get Neovim >= 0.12.

sudo apt install ripgrep fd-find

Arch

sudo pacman -S neovim ripgrep fd

Fedora

sudo dnf install neovim ripgrep fd-find

Some bundles need tools you install yourself. Optional extras are left out here; :checkhealth noethervim reports the full picture for the bundles you actually enabled, and every bundle file lists its own requirements in its header.

Bundles: extra tooling

• c-cpp needs compile_commands.json
• go needs Go toolchain
• java needs a JDK 21 or newer
• latex needs latexmk
• python needs Python 3
• rust needs rust-analyzer, Cargo
• web-dev needs Node.js
• remote-dev needs distant, distant on the remote host
• tmux needs tmux
• ai needs curl
• git needs libgit2
• http needs curl
• octo needs GitHub CLI
• repl needs a REPL for your language
• task-runner needs your project build tool
• obsidian needs a vault path
• zotero needs Zotero, sqlite3

Installation

Copy the starter config and open Neovim:

mkdir -p ~/.config/nvim
curl -fLo ~/.config/nvim/init.lua https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Chiarandini/NoetherVim/main/init.lua.example
nvim

This copies NoetherVim’s init.lua template, which auto-installs lazy.nvim + NoetherVim and the core plugins, and has all bundles commented out. On first launch, lazy.nvim bootstraps itself, pulls all plugins, and runs noethervim.setup(). If you know what you’re doing you can write the init.lua file yourself - this documentation will assume you used the init.lua template provided by NoetherVim.

Caution

If you have an existing Neovim config, back it up first before running the above command:

mv ~/.config/nvim ~/.config/nvim.bak
mv ~/.local/share/nvim ~/.local/share/nvim.bak
mv ~/.local/state/nvim ~/.local/state/nvim.bak
mv ~/.cache/nvim ~/.cache/nvim.bak

see migrating from an existing config for granular migration options.

Tip

Want to try NoetherVim without replacing your config? Neovim’s NVIM_APPNAME feature lets you run multiple configs side by side:

mkdir -p ~/.config/noethervim
curl -fLo ~/.config/noethervim/init.lua \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Chiarandini/NoetherVim/main/init.lua.example
NVIM_APPNAME=noethervim nvim

Your existing ~/.config/nvim/ stays untouched. Add alias nv='NVIM_APPNAME=noethervim nvim' (where nv can be replaced by any name you want) to your shell profile for convenience.