I used to use lazy, which I still maintain is a very good plugin management system available to neovim users.

However, nvim has vim.pack, and as of nvim 0.12 and later, is available to use out of the box. With that in mind, I decided to try a more minimalist approach to plugin management.

It's worth pointing out that I don't massively soup up my nvim config. If I want language servers and autocomplete I'm quite content with Zed.

I really use nvim as just a text editor, which might shock some of you.

vim.pack

It's very simple. To add a plugin:

vim.pack.add({
    { src = "https://github.com/NeogitOrg/neogit" }
})

That's it. It pulls that plugin from the Git repository and keeps it somewhere in ~/.local/share/nvim/site/pack/core/opt.

Plugin structure

The good thing about this approach is that you can have the download and configuration of a plugin in one file.

Referring back to neogit.

vim.pack.add({
    { src = "https://github.com/NeogitOrg/neogit" }
})

local neogit = require("neogit")
neogit.setup({
    disable_context_highlighting = true
})

This goes into plugin/ and it is executed on load. Note that execution order may not be deterministic, so you would want to keep dependencies in the same lua module.

Config structure

So what I do is have my config structured as follows:

~/.config/nvim/
├── init.lua
├── lua
│   └── joefg
│       ├── init.lua
│       ├── macros.lua
│       ├── netrw.lua
│       ├── settings.lua
│       ├── statusline.lua
│       └── template.lua
├── nvim-pack-lock.json
├── plugin
│   ├── gitsigns.lua
│   ├── neogit.lua
│   └── polyglot.lua
└── README.md

This allows me to have a super minimalist init.lua.

local config = require("joefg")
config.setup()

Easy peasy! It's also worth noting I can configure things inside this init.lua if I wanted to, but those would happen after everything else has loaded.