Setting Up Neovim as a Development Environment on CachyOS

After years of using VS Code I decided to try going all-in on Neovim. This is what my setup looks like after a few weeks of tweaking.

Why Neovim

VS Code works fine but it feels heavy on a terminal-first workflow. I spend most of my time in a terminal anyway, so having the editor live there too reduces context switching. Neovim with a good config is also noticeably faster to open and navigate.

Installing

On CachyOS (Arch-based) the latest stable Neovim is in the main repos:

sudo pacman -S neovim

If you want nightly builds:

yay -S neovim-nightly-bin

Config structure

I use lazy.nvim as the plugin manager. My config lives at ~/.config/nvim/ with this layout:

nvim/
├── init.lua
└── lua/
    ├── plugins/
    │   ├── lsp.lua
    │   ├── treesitter.lua
    │   └── ui.lua
    └── settings.lua

Essential plugins

Plugin	Purpose
`nvim-lspconfig`	Language server protocol support
`nvim-treesitter`	Syntax highlighting and text objects
`telescope.nvim`	Fuzzy finder for files, grep, buffers
`nvim-cmp`	Autocompletion
`gitsigns.nvim`	Git diff indicators in the gutter

LSP setup

Install language servers through Mason:

:MasonInstall lua-language-server pyright typescript-language-server

Then wire them up in lsp.lua:

local lspconfig = require('lspconfig')

lspconfig.pyright.setup({})
lspconfig.ts_ls.setup({})
lspconfig.lua_ls.setup({
  settings = {
    Lua = { diagnostics = { globals = { 'vim' } } }
  }
})

What I’m still figuring out

Debugger integration with nvim-dap — works but the config is involved
A good workflow for markdown/notes that doesn’t feel slower than VS Code