How To Build a Simple Neovim Plugin

Curiosity killed the cat but what about the mouse? Made by generative AI.

In the Software world a language or tool will thrive or die depending on the strength of its ecosystem. You can have a great programming language but if no one is using it and putting time and effort into the community, then it will not survive very long.

I think this is very important when it comes to Vim and more specifically — Neovim. It is getting quite popular these days and I think one of the reasons for that is the community and the sheer amount of great plugins now available in the ecosystem.

You can have a great programming language but if no one is using it and putting time and effort into the community, then it will not survive very long.

I’ve used a bunch of plugins during my Neovim journey and gained a massive amount of benefits from those. Therefore, I wanted to take the time to learn how to make a simple plugin in Neovim and then share that experience here.

Getting Started

Just for ease of implementation I am going to be building this plugin in a standalone directory. A real life Neovim plugin would have its own git repository so it could easily be used by many people. I will not be doing that as the point of this article is to show the main pieces needed to build your own Neovim plugin.