Skip to main content

How to use the NeoVim AppImage in VSCode on Linux

The Neovim logo
Getting the latest version of NeoVim installed and running correctly on my Pop OS Linux installation turns out to be surprisingly difficult. The PopShop app store installs either a very old version of NeoVim, or an up-to-date version that's sandboxed -- both options don't work with VSCode.

I'm using the Debian & Ubuntu derived Pop OS on my IdeaPad 5. This means if I want to install software, I can use apt -- but that will only install software packages that are in the distribution's package repositories.

Usually that's not a problem, but sometimes the version of the software I want to install is not as current as I might like.

That's exactly the problem I have right now with NeoVim.

sudo apt  install neovim  # version 0.6.1-3

I want to use NeoVim as my editor in VSCode with the excellent VSCode Neovim plugin. But, as of this writing, the plugin requires version 0.9 or greater, so I need to install a more current version -- or even better, the latest version of NeoVim, 0.9.4.

Installing NeoVim: the AppImage

After some trial and error, I found that the latest AppImage Neovim package works with VSCode. Here's how to install it:

  1. Download nvim.appimage and configure as described in the Linux (x64) section from Release Nvim release build · neovim/neovim.
  2. Move the AppImage to your preferred AppImage folder (mine is ~/Applications)
  3. At the command prompt, go to your AppImage folder and run chmod u+x nvim.appimage && ./nvim.appimage to ensure the nvim AppImage will run on your system.
  4. Update the Vscode-neovim › Neovim Executable Paths: Linux with the absolute path to the nvim.appimage file. This means no ~ characters -- instead, something like this: /home/accountname/Applications/nvim.appimage (your exact path will be different).
  5. Reload VSCode.

I was not able to get either the Flatpak or Snap versions of NeoVim to work with the VSCode Neovim plugin, because these types of packages are intentionally sandboxed to keep your system safe.

But the AppImage worked exactly as expected, and I can use the latest and greatest version of NeoVim. I'm back to coding in VSCode with all of the vim movement commands literally at my fingertips.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Essential Firefox Add-Ons For the Cloud

If you don't want to be tied down to a desktop, you need direct access to your computer in the cloud. Since Firefox runs just about everywhere, it's a good place to start to set up a reliable way to access your accounts. Blog & Social  Delicious Bookmarks is the recommended and official Firefox add-on for Delicious, the world's leading social bookmarking service (formerly del.icio.us). It integrates your bookmarks and tags with Firefox and keeps them in sync for easy, convenient access. Syncing slows down startup, though. ScribeFire Blog Editor is a blog editor that integrates with your browser and lets you easily post to your blog. They've also integrated their affiliate Quick Ads advertising program, which I haven't tried.
Post a Comment
Read more

Joomla 1.5 Directory Status: Writeable

[UPDATED] Joomla 1.5 is acting flaky on one of our installations because the directories are set to ‘unwriteable’. To see the their current state, log in as Super Administrator and go to Help > System Info > Directory Permissions . Elsewhere, it's been suggested that the specified directories must be set to “world-writeable” (777). This works, but it is a very bad idea , since it means anyone can change your files! Not cool. Fixing Security with User and Group Settings To perform these changes, you need shell (command line) access to your server. If you don't have it, you can beg your host to make these changes for you, or switch to a Joomla-friendly host. I'm going to assume that you are using a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) server because if you're not, then ... well, these instructions should work in principle, but the specifics for your server may be quite different. Here's the issue: you, the FTP user, need full access to your files. So does Joomla,...
13 comments
Read more

Atom: Hackable Text Editor for Ubuntu

It all started when I wanted to convert some text to Title Case. Ubuntu's default text editor, gedit, is quite capable, but does not include case conversion. A quick trip to Google and I found  (gedit is number 4). Since I write some code, too, I'm always interested in a good text editor. After going through the list, I picked #2, Atom. Atom looks appealing for a number of reasons. It's available through the Ubuntu Software app (almost -- see below for details) It's built on web technologies. It's cross-platform. From the article: Atom is a free and open source text editor that’s developed by GitHub. Based on Electron (CoffeeScript, JS, Less, HTML), it’s a desktop application that’s built using web technologies ... The major features of Atom are cross-platform editing, built-in package manager, file system browser, multiple pane support, find and replace function, and smart autocompletion. You can select from 1000s of open source packages and add ...
4 comments
Read more