A lot of new Neovim plugins come with a setup function which lets you specify the settings of the plugin. Users are expected to call that function with a table as arguments which contains the user’s personal settings to override the defaults. This works, but Lua is all about tables, so let’s look at an alternative.
The most annoying part about writing plugins for Neovim has been the lack of a good test framework. There are a couple of frameworks, and Vader has been my favourite so far, but they all have their downsides. This made me wonder: why limit myself to Vim/Neovim test frameworks? We have a full Lua runtime, and other people already have solved the testing problem for Lua. Busted does 90% of what we need, so let’s fill in the remaining 10%. The following is based on my experience with adding tests to rainbow-delimiters.nvim.
Yo dawg, I heard you like Neovim, so I put a Neovim inside your Neovim, so you can edit while you edit! Ahem… anyway, in my previous post I proposed a plugin which would make it easier to control an embedded Neovim from within Neovim. So I went ahead and wrote yo-dawg.nvim (GitHub mirror), named after the “Yo dawg” internet meme.
Recently I tagged version 0.9.1 of rainbow-delimiters.nvim. This update got rid of one really nasty mistake I had been dragging along from the very beginning until just recently: every time you started up Neovim a number of require calls would run even if you never called require a single time yourself. In this post I would like to go over how this happened, why it is bad and how I got rid of it. Even though I am using rainbow-delimiters as an example here, everything I am about to say applies to other plugins as well.