What is the purpose of extraLuaPackages?

[nicolas-goudry]

Just wondering what is the purpose of the extraLuaPackages option?

I tried to use it to add Lua modules to my Nixvim config, but the modules are not available in Neovim…

For example, I once tried to add the inspect module in order to be able to pretty print tables in Neovim, but it didn’t work.

{
  extraLuaPackages = ps: [ ps.inspect ];
}

To be clear, Neovim works fine, but if I try to run :lua print(require("inspect")({ test = "test" })) it just fails with the following error message:

E5108: Error executing lua [string ":lua"]:1: module 'inspect' not found:

[MattSturgeon]

Good question. It's defined here, but I can't find the actual implementation...

nixvim/modules/output.nix

Line 93 in 7a2a25a

extraLuaPackages = mkOption {

Based on uses, I'd say it's a wrapper on extraPackages with access to the pkgs.luaPackages scope used to build neovim.

Therefore, adding luaPackages is unlikely to add the corresponding vim plugins to your runtimepath.

Rather than adding pkgs.luaPackages.* to your extraPackages you should be adding pkgs.vimPlugins.*.

Either use extraPlugins to define plugin packages and config together, or extraPackages to just install the plugin package.

[nicolas-goudry]

Thanks for your answer 🙂

I did find the option definition, but like you I couldn’t find the implementation… Nevertheless, I think your explanation does make sense. But then it seems kind of impossible (currently at least) to just add a random Lua module to the runtimepath.

Should I open an issue in this regard?

[MattSturgeon]

The first couple FAQs are on this topic. Do they help clarify anything?

Also, do you have any feedback on (specific parts of) the docs? We're always looking to improve them. Specific actionable feedback is the most helpful, but we'll take anything 😅

You're welcome to open separate issues/discussions, chat on matrix or continue in this thread.

[nicolas-goudry]

Since inspect is not a Vim plugin per-se (and neither is packaged as a Vim plugin), sadly the FAQ doesn’t help in this regard.

As for feedback, I’m pretty happy with the way things are done in Nixvim and the documentation is pretty great! However, we could always improve, so here are a few nitpicks I can think of right away:

• deprecated options are not marked as such in documentation
• options discovery could be better (search? like on search.nixos.org) since the options sub-attrsets are in a different page

Another thing, which seems like a good idea but may very well not be one:

I often need to define keymaps for some plugins which do not provide a keymaps option so it would be great to be able to add a keymaps option to all plugins that do not provide one OOTB. This keymaps would then be merged with the global keymaps option.

For context, here is my config: https://github.com/nicolas-goudry/nixvim-config

As you can see, I split my config in « topics » and made an auto-loader for plugins. Then, in the plugins I define opts which are the plugin options and I can use rootOpts to define root options, like keymaps. Example

I have the feeling that this could be a pretty common use case, but I also fear that it would complexify Nixvim configuration understanding/discovery.