Neovim on Windows

I may be missing something but Neovim requires some additional configuration to make it work on Windows; the following are the things I’ve done to make Neovim work on a Windows machine that also makes it co-exist with Vim.¹ After downloading Neovim and unzipping that to somewhere, the first thing to do is to configure it through init.vim.

init.vim aka Neovim’s .vim/_vimrc

Most online articles say init.vim should reside at ~/.config/nvim/init.vim and, well, we know ~ translates to %userprofile% (or C:\Users\username) in Windows. Nope, in Windows, it should be ~/AppData/Local/nvim/init.vim, as an answer on Stack Overflow says.

Add the following to init.vim to make Neovim reuse Vim’s configurations, thus easing the transition from and making it co-exists with Vim:

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set runtimepath+=~/vimfiles,~/vimfiles/after
set packpath+=~/vimfiles
source ~/_vimrc

The script above assumes Vim runtime files exist at ~/vimfiles; amend that accordingly to your setup.

The last line in the script loads Vim’s configuration from ~/_vimrc (so change that too if yours exists elsewhere).

Runtime path

And within the Stack Overflow answer (and everywhere else), someone mentioned that the location is also stated in the help file, “With :help init.vim, you can get the location…” Trying that, Neovim helpfully tells me “Sorry, no help for init.vim”.

Similar to vim, Neovim has its own set of runtime files. Although Neovim bundles them in its distribution, it puts them at Neovim/share/nvim/runtime and doesn’t include it in the default runtimepath. Instead of copying the contents in runtime over to Neovim/bin, add that to the runtimepath in init.vim:

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set runtimepath+=~/vimfiles,~/vimfiles/after,c:/neovim/share/nvim/runtime
set packpath+=~/vimfiles
source ~/_vimrc

Notice that Neovim’s runtime directory is appended to the first line. Again, change that to point to the directory where you’ve unzipped Neovim.

And that completes the setup required to run Neovim on Windows.