Intro #

If you’re Neovim fan, it is important to have multiple configs. You can configure like this:

• ~/.config/nvim: Your main configuration. When you’re working on your project, this is the configuration that will be loaded.
• ~/.config/nvim-alt: Your secondary Neovim configuration where you can implement new things.

So now, let’s configure it.

Setup Neovim Playground #

Assuming that your main Neovim configured, let’s configure the alternate Neovim configuration.

This example wll be using kickstart.nvim as an alternative configuration. You can choose other starterkit like Lazy.nvim or distribution like Nvchad, Astro, etc.

git clone https://github.com/nvim-lua/kickstart.nvim.git "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}"/nvim-alt

Now you can start start Neovim with the nvim-alt configuration using the command below.

NVIM_APPNAME=nvim-alt nvim

Adding Neovim Playground to bashrc/zshrc #

The efficient to do this is to create an alias through ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc file:

echo "alias nvimalt='NVIM_APPNAME=nvim-alt nvim'" >> ~/.bashrc # or ~/.zshrc

# for Bash user
source ~/.bashrc

# for ZSH user
source ~/.zshrc

You can now run Neovim alternative with the nvimalt command.