Where to start when feeling overwhelmed?

[permafrozen]

TLDR; great project, but I have trouble following the documentation

Hello, sorry for opening this, but I am feeling really overwhelmed by this project. I am using Nix/NixOs for about one year and have a pretty good fundamental understanding, but I really struggle with this projects documentation because I don't know anything about configuring Neovim.

When I first started using Linux, I thought go big or go home and just flashed minimal nixos onto my school laptop so I would have pressure learning it and getting it to run. That worked pretty well. That was about one year ago, so I thought the same about neovim, but I am really struggling with finding the "right" way to do things. I already tried nixvim, nvf and similar projects but hated that it was more like a "nix framework" for neovim and I just didn't enjoy myself using them, since a lot of the time I just found myself writing raw lua into strings. This is literally the perfect project for my needs, and I am trying my best with understanding neovim but I just really struggle for some reason with the documentation system. I just can't find what I am looking for and often when I find it, I would need a lot more knowledge about neovim to actually understand it. I mean I kind of get it, but at the same time there is so much more advanced stuff, that I simply don't know anything about, e.g the nixCatsUtils helper functions, LSP on_attach, ...; I understand it is out of scope for this projects documentation to cover all the neovim basics, but I simply can't find the right ressources to learn from.

I still think this is a great project and would like to know if anybody has some recommendations to learn about neovim. I have a bad habit of "overreading" into documentation and than just forgetting everything and doing it all over again, without actually getting anything done, so the neovim documentation is the worst possible match for my bean shaped object inside my skull.

ty and ily here is a picture of my cat for asking silly questions:

[BirdeeHub]

😸 meow 😸

https://github.com/BirdeeHub/nixCats-nvim/tree/main/templates/simple

Probably this template. I made this one in such a way that it uses the default things in nvim as much as possible (see :h 'rtp' also), and it also is just a function in a file which you provide a pkgs and nixCats and returns a neovim package. You can stick it directly into your nix config and import ./thedir { inherit pkgs; inherit (inputs) nixCats }

for example it has an lsp setup using entirely the builtin vim.lsp options where to install the lsp you just add the lsp to the list

Biggest tip I can give to not get lost, is start by looking at the template, and look at the help for what the sections in the nix stuff do, not the other way around.

The rest outside of the 1 nix file that installs stuff is all nvim, and for learning basic nvim config, the lua in the simple template is probably the way to go. It doesnt make much use of the lua/ directory, (you can put stuff in there if you want to be able to require it) but it will teach you the basics.

It is basically a template which contains more or less ONLY the setup functions and options for a few plugins as they offer them in their readmes with no ceremony, and a default lsp setup, put into the plugin/ directory, with 1 thing in the ftplugin/ directory as well as a demonstration. It doesn't complicate things by having multiple packages with different categories and settings right off the bat either, just a single general category that everything is in.

If you want the simple template as a separate flake rather than a function you can call which returns a package, you would move the things in the default.nix into this template, and put the new flake.nix in place of the default.nix but otherwise, nothing would need to change

This is the docs for the neovim plugin, basically, the information from your package definitions set for your package just gets written into a lua table and it also lets you call them like functions with keynames to do a safe recursive table index.

For all the sections in categoryDefinitions, this is the list

For a short explanation of the packageDefintions set and how it works alongside the categoryDefinitions, that would be here and in the next section is all of the settings which you can use in the settings set within them

For a list of all the functions in the utils set, that would be here but you probably wont need anything not already in the template for a while.

As you get more comfortable with nvim config and how nixCats provides things to your config, feel free to steal from the more advanced example template

[BirdeeHub]

As a side note, I keep meaning to move a lot of the exposition out of the in-editor docs and put more of it in markdown, so that the website has a more consistent style and better formatting for the exposition, and the in-editor docs are a focused explanation of the options you would want to have a shortlist of while configuring, and the neovim plugin.

I feel this would help it not feel overwhelming, but there are a LOT of docs to go through and there are so many other things to learn and do, and still things that could use coding (even in nixCats, although, not much) that it is just not something I have done. I have tried to do the rewrite of the docs with AI tooling, but it always gets garbled... so it would be a similar amount of work even with AI, (although it would at least give a decent format for a template to fill in with the info) The work wouldn't be in making the stuff go into the website well formatted, automatically, and cheaply, that's fun and not too hard really, the work is in putting good documentation on the page XD

But for the focused intro, start with the templates, at least most of them should have their nix code annotated with their associated help section in comments, start there, read the help for more info on the particular section and the full list of things in it.

[permafrozen]

oki thanks for the answer