I have been using Neovim for personal projects for over a year. Recently, I want to set up Neovim system wide so that other users in the server can also use my config if they want. In this post, I will summarize the necessary configurations.

Installation

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First, you need to install Neovim in a system location, for example, under /opt. Then edit the system profile /etc/profile and add the path of Neovim:

export PATH=/etc/nvim-linux64/bin:PATH

Configuration

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Global configuration

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According to the documentation of Neovim, Neovim will look for nvim/sysinit.vim under $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS (the default is /etc/xdg)¹.

So for global configuration, we need to put all configuration under /etc/xdg/nvim. Take my configuration for an example:

mkdir /etc/xdg/nvim && cd /etc/xdg/nvim && git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jdhao/nvim-config.git .

We also need to create a symlink sysinit.vim and link it to init.vim:

ln -s init.vim sysinit.vim

Change the value of g:nvim_system_wide in init.vim to 1 to install the plugins system-wide.

Since I use vim-plug to manage plugins, I have set up vim-plug to install the system wide plugin under /usr/local/share/nvim/site (see code here). Now, as root user, open neovim and use :PlugInstall to install plugins.

The system configuration is finished.

Personal configuration

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Usually, each user may want to change the default configuration set by the root. The user’s personal config should be put in $HOME/.config/nvim/init.vim. It will override the global configurations.

There is currently one gotcha: the users can not install local plugins using vim-plug easily. If the user want to install a custom plugin, they should first clone the plugin repo to a location and add the plugin path to runtimepath. For example, if we install ayu-vim under /home/jdhao/.local/share/nvim/plugged/ayu-vim, we should add the following setting to $HOME/.config/nvim/init.vim:

set runtimepath+=/home/jdhao/.local/share/nvim/plugged/ayu-vim

Another way of adding your personal plugins to runtimepath is by using vim-plug:

Plug '~/.local/share/nvim/plugged/ayu-vim'

You have to manually update the plugin though.

References

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• Neovim doc, :h 'runtimepath'.
• Neovim doc, :h startup.
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XDG_Base_Directory
• https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/8871
• system wide nvim config.