[Plugin] (Neo)Vim plugins manager: packer

Published on January 31, 2023

#(Neo)vim #(Neo)vim-Plugins

Edits:
    - on 2024-09-07: With deprecation of packer, I have now moved to lazy.nvim (the plugin manager, not lazyvim)

When moving back to Vim after few years “ignoring” it, I quickly moved to Neovim and embraced the lua language which “pushed” me to use packer as my plugins manager of choice. It exists a lot of (Neo)vim plugins managers with different advantages/drawbacks balance depending on your needs. While I used vim-plug back in the days, I decided to move to packer because it offers:

Features I use

• Declarative plugin specification
• Support for dependencies
• Uses native packages
• Extensible
• Written in Lua, configured in Lua
• Post-install/update hooks
• Uses jobs for async installation
• Support for local plugins

What I especially makes packer a no brainer for me is that:

• it fits my full lua Neovim config
• you can manage all your plugins in one single file
• the syntax is extremely simple:

use '*maintainer_name*/*package_name*' # to install a plugin

 require('*package_name*') # to manage dependencies

• plugins’ github pages always have a default template if specific configurations is required

Features I have tried

• Support for git tags, branches, revisions, submodules

I’m certainly a nerd but not a git one :) I use codeberg BTW. There are a lot of git-related plugins to manage your repository(ies) with (Neo)vim.

More features than I need

• Expressive configuration and lazy-loading options
• Automatically compiles efficient lazy-loading code to improve startup time
• Support for Luarocks dependencies

I should probably spend some time digging into the benefits of these features but days are too short and my laziness is too big.

Sharing a small trick

Adding nvim --headless -c 'PackerSync' in your .xinitrc will automatically update your plugins in the background at each boot of your machine.