Go package for writing Neovim plugins

go get github.com/myitcv/neovim

This package is very much in alpha as the Neovim API itsef is still in flux. Therefore, expect changes to this API.

A current, idiomatic example of a plugin written against neovim is neovim-go, a plugin that is designed to help support the editing of Go files.

A further example can be found here; this example demonstrates on-the-fly compiling of a Go file.

At the time of writing this package has only been written for/tested against Linux.

Support welcomed on other platforms

Tests currently rely on the NEOVIM_LISTEN_ADDRESS environment variable being set

NEOVIM_LISTEN_ADDRESS=/tmp/neovim go test

First get the generator:

go get github.com/myitcv/neovim/_cmd/gen_neovim_api

The API generator relies on nvim being in your $PATH. Here are the various options:

$ ./gen_neovim_api -h
Usage: ./gen_neovim_api [-p] [-g] [-f filename]

  -c=false: custom print
  -f="": file containing the list of API functions to generate
  -g=false: generate code from the API
  -p=false: print the API

One of -p or -g must be supplied

If -g is supplied, -f may also be supplied to provide a list of functions to generate

The -g flag currently outputs to stdout; future work will provide a flag to have it place the generated, formatted source in $GOPATH as appropriate.

• @tarruda for leading the way with his python-client
• @vmihailenco for msgpack

• Delete remote plugin-host branch
• Neovim hooks up stdin and stdout back to front
• Remove example_test.go - it is superseded by example and associated tests
• Ensure that example gives examples (!) of testing API requests, handling requests and events
• Consider using internal in Go 1.4 for better layout of package
• Better definition of logging level-based interface for plugins
• Stop using KillChannel in generated plugin-host; move to Tomb
• Need some way for plugins to be loaded at startup...
• Support Go package acting as a server, i.e. receiving requests from Neovim
• Cleanly handle Neovim instances quitting - need to kill goroutines for reading, subscription manager etc
• Need a test to confirm we have cleaned up all goroutines
• Move from log.Fatal to something better....will work now that we have tomb
• Tidy up use of PanicOnError and ensure all errors that would otherwise have been return use panic if this is set
• Ensure tests panic if there is an error so we can see the stack
• Add support for functions that CanFail
• Get full test coverage; can we auto-generate certain basic tests?
• Test on more platforms
• Tidy up the API generator - it's very messy. Very messy
• Make the API generator optionally write the generated file into the appropriate place in $GOPATH
• Check our use of types; e.g. what does Integer in the API really map to? uint64?
• Look into semantics of current decision to make certain channels buffered
• Look at how we verify at runtime whether the Neovim instance to which we have connected exposes an API with which we (a calling client) was compiled. This handshake will probably need some work on the Neovim side (versioning of the API perhaps?). See comments in this thread
• More benchmark tests for performance
• Make notification decoding can be made more efficient (currently uses generic DecodeSlice)
• Fix function and variable names (there are a few anomalies like Client.GetVvar)