coc.nvim Language Server with Neovim

After writing the last blog on how to setup a Linux Kernel Development environment, I realized I haven’t written how I’ve setup Neovim with coc.nvim in NixOS.

What is Neovim

Neovim is a powerful and extensible text editor. Neovim is a fork of Vim7. One of its strengths is its support for plugins that enhance its functionality. Coc.nvim is one such plugin that brings powerful language server protocol (LSP) support to Neovim, making it an excellent choice for programming and text editing tasks.

Neovim in NixOS

First, we list neovim as one of the packages, eg.

{
  # ...
  environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    # ...
    nodejs
  ];
  # ...
}

If you would like to get clangd, rust-analyzer, and java language server, remember to add the following:

      clang_16
      clang-tools_16
      jdk

Neovim Configurations

Install Vim-Plug

Simply run the following command to install Vim-Plug, a plugin manager.

sh -c 'curl -fLo "${XDG_DATA_HOME:-$HOME/.local/share}"/nvim/site/autoload/plug.vim --create-dirs \
       https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim'

Init.vim

Open the Neovim configuration file. This is typically located at ~/.config/nvim/init.vim, create one if it doesn’t exist.

Inside init.vim, add in the coc-nvim plugin:

call plug#begin('~/.config/nvim/plugged')
Plug 'neoclide/coc.nvim', {'branch': 'release'}

call plug#end()

Save and run :PlugInstall to install the plugin. Then run :CocConfig which changes coc-settings.json, to make clangd and rust-analyzer work, we need to add the following:

{
  "clangd.path": "/etc/profiles/per-user/yourusername/bin/clangd",
  "rust-analyzer.server.path": "/etc/profiles/per-user/yourusername/bin/rust-analyzer"
}

I also usually add format file on save setting:

{
  "coc.preferences.formatOnSaveFiletypes": ["*"]
}

Dotfiles

Check out my dotfiles.