Modern Neovim — User Interface

Explore plugins to improve the user experience using Neovim.

Modern Neovim — User Interface

Let’s check out interesting plugins to improve the Neovim user interface.

This article is part of the Modern Neovim series.

The Neovim configuration files are available in this repository.

Getting Started

We talked about Helix in the Helix series. Helix is a modal editor with a modern user interface. For example, it displays the pop-up menu for the keymappings on the bottom right, as shown below. We will take some cues from Helix and adapt them to the Neovim user interface.

Helix User Interface

KeyMapping

For our existing configuration, we use which-key.nvim to display the key bindings, and hydra.nvim for custom sub-modes and menus.

We can use the mini.clue plugin to have a similar experience to Helix.

Let’s change our configuration to have the option to switch between which-key.nvim and mini.clue. In the lua/config/init.lua file, we add the options to enable or disable both plugins.

return {
  keymenu = {
    which_key = false,
    mini_clue = true,
  },
  ...

We disable which-key.nvim and enable mini.clue.

In the lua/plugins/whichkey.lua file, we specify a condition to load the plugin using the option.

  {
    "folke/which-key.nvim",
    cond = function()
      return require("config").keymenu.which_key
    end,
....

mini.clue

In the lua/plugins/mini.lua file, we install and configure the mini.clue plugin.

We configure the delay to show the pop-up menu to be the same as vim.o.timeoutlen.

window = {
  delay = vim.o.timeoutlen,
}