Neovim Install on WSL with Vim-Plug

If you're a programmer working on Windows, you might have heard of the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). WSL allows you to run a Linux environment on Windows, which can be really useful for programming.

One of the most popular text editors among programmers is Neovim. In this guide, we'll be showing you how to install Neovim on WSL and how to set it up with the Vim-Plug plugin manager.

Installing Neovim on WSL

To start, you'll need to have WSL installed on your Windows machine. If you haven't installed it yet, you can follow the instructions on the official Microsoft website.

Once you have WSL installed, you can open up your terminal and run the following command to install Neovim:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install neovim

This will install Neovim on your WSL environment.

Setting up Vim-Plug

Next, we'll need to set up Vim-Plug, which is a really useful plugin manager for Neovim. To install Vim-Plug, run the following command:

curl -fLo ~/.local/share/nvim/site/autoload/plug.vim --create-dirs \
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim

This will download and install Vim-Plug on your WSL environment.

Using Vim-Plug

Now that we have Vim-Plug installed, we can use it to install plugins for Neovim. To do this, we'll need to create a configuration file for Neovim.

Create a new file in your home directory called .config/nvim/init.vim. You can do this with the following command:

mkdir -p ~/.config/nvim/
touch ~/.config/nvim/init.vim

Once you've created the file, open it up in your preferred text editor and add the following lines:

call plug#begin('~/.local/share/nvim/plugged')
Plug 'tpope/vim-fugitive'
Plug 'tpope/vim-surround'
Plug 'scrooloose/nerdtree'
call plug#end()

Here, we're adding three plugins to Neovim: vim-fugitive, vim-surround, and nerdtree. You can replace these with whatever plugins you want to use.

Save the file and exit your text editor.

Finally, run the following command to install the plugins:

nvim +PlugInstall +qall

This will install the plugins and set up Neovim with Vim-Plug.

Conclusion

In this guide, we've shown you how to install Neovim on WSL and set it up with Vim-Plug. Now you can start using Neovim as your text editor of choice on Windows!