Neovim Built-in Features and Tricks

alpha2phi
3 min readJun 5, 2021

Few Neovim only features and tricks without any plugins.

Neovim Features and Tricks

Overview

In this article let’s go through a few Neovim only features which I find useful.

Show Effects of a Command Incrementally

Type :h icm to read the help of this command.

This is a global option and by default, it is set to blank.

Possible values are

  • nosplit: Shows the effects of a command incrementally, as you type.
  • split: Also shows partial off-screen results in a preview window.

Works for |:substitute|, |:smagic|, |:snomagic|. |hl-Substitute|

split

Type :set icm=split and now try to perform text substitution.

inccommand=split

A preview window is displayed to show you the live substitution result. You can press Escape to cancel it.

nosplit

Type :set icm=nosplit and now try to perform text substitution.

inccommand=nosplit

As you type you can see the substitution effect directly in the buffer. You can press Escape to cancel the command.

Send LSP Diagnostics to Quickfix Window

Latest Neovim supports LSP natively. With this, you can configure the LSP to send diagnostics to the quick fix window.

You can use this feature together with nvim-bqf or telescope.nvim to preview and perform a fuzzy search.

alpha2phi

Software engineer, Data Science and ML practitioner.