Faster Neovim Plugin Development with plenary.nvim

Use plenary.nvim to help you develop plugins faster.

Develop Plugin using plenary.nvim

Overview

In this article, let’s walk through plenary.nvimwhich is a Neovim Lua library that provides essential Lua functions we need to develop Neovim plugins.

Popup

A popup menu can be easily created using the library.

Default Popup

local popup = require "plenary.popup"
local function create_default_popup()
  local win_id = popup.create({ "menu item 1", "menu item 2", "menu item 3" }, {})
  print(win_id)
end
create_default_popup()

Custom Popup

I can also specify the line, column, minimum width, border, and highlight.

vim.cmd [[highlight PopupColor ctermbg=black ctermfg=blue guifg=blue guibg=green]]
local function create_highlight_popup()
  local win_id = popup.create({ "item 1", "item 2", "item 3" }, {
    line = 15,
    col = 45,
    minwidth = 20,
    border = true,
    highlight = "PopupColor",
  })
  print(win_id)
end
create_highlight_popup()

Custom Border Popup

This creates a popup with a custom border.

local function create_border_popup(borderchars)
  local _, config = popup.create("popup with custom border", {
    line = 8,
    col = 55,
    padding = { 0, 3, 0, 3 },
    borderchars = borderchars,
  })
  local border_id = config.border.win_id
  local border_bufnr = vim.api.nvim_win_get_buf(border_id)
  print(border_id)
  print(border_bufnr)
end
create_border_popup { "+" }

Check out the code snippet for more examples.

Job

Job module allows us to run system processes or commands easily.

Sync Job

local Job = require "plenary.job"
local function sync_job()
  local job = Job:new {
    command = "ls",
    args = { "-l" },
  }
  job:sync()
  print(vim.inspect.inspect(job:result()))
end