NeoVim Per-Environment Configs

The Problem

I use NeoVim for my coding tasks [and you should too ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)], but an issue i’ve been having is keeping two versions going for my init.lua config file - one for my personal webdev work and livecoding stuff, and another specifically for my day job, which I generally do inside a virtual machine.

Both of these configs share a lot of features / keymaps (I always need HTML/CSS/JS features), but I don’t need SuperCollider language support for work, and conversely don’t need PHP debugger configs cluttering up my personal NeoVim config.

The Solution

My solution is to use

1. a .nvim_env file, which just contains the name of the specific environment i’m in (ex. work, or personal)
2. lua/shared.lua, which contains the common configs, like my base vim options, colorscheme, treesitter configs for languages i’ll use in both environments, etc.
3. Configs for each environment - personal.lua contains configs for languages I don’t use for work, or paths that are hard-coded for my system. work.lua includes my VM-specific configs like my (PHP) XDebug or php-cs-fixer.
4. Rules in init.lua to conditionally load the above configs based on the .nvim_env string.

/nvim_env

personal

/init.lua

-- default to the 'personal' config
local env = "personal"

-- Detect environment
local marker_file = vim.fn.stdpath('config') .. '/.nvim_env'
if vim.fn.filereadable(marker_file) == 1 then
  env = vim.fn.readfile(marker_file)[1]
  if env then
    env = env:gsub('^%s*(.-)%s*$', '%1') -- trim whitespace
  end
end

-- Load shared configuration
require('shared').setup()

-- Load environment-specific configuration
if env == 'work' then
  require('work').setup()
elseif env == 'personal' then
  require('personal').setup()
end

/work/shared.lua

-- Shared configuration for both work and personal environments
local Z = {}

function Z.setup()
  vim.o.number = true
  vim.o.relativenumber = true
  vim.o.ignorecase = true
  -- config continues...
end

return Z

and /lua/work.lua and /lua/personal.lua share the same format!

Pitfalls

You might use one plugin in multiple environments with different configurations, but their setup functions should only be run once, like vim.lsp.config in my case. Functions that like have to exist in the environment-specific files (work.lua or personal.lua), so some config code might be duplicated between environments.

Conclusion

This isn’t a perfect solution, but it’s been working well for me. I can manage my configs via a singular git repo, and I no longer have the config-drift problem I’ve dealt with for several years :) Hope it’s helpful!

My full NeoVim config is public on github, though it does require NeoVim 12+ (mostly for the new built-in package manager vim.pack)