Nvimpager

Using neovim as a pager to view man pages, git diffs, whatnot with neovim's syntax highlighting and mouse support.

About

The nvimpager script calls neovim in a fashion that turns it into something like a pager. The idea is not new, this is actually rewrite of vimpager but with less (but stricter) dependencies and specifically for neovim.

Some typical use cases:

# view a file in nvimpager
nvimpager file
# pipe text to nvimpager
echo some text | nvimpager
# use it as your default $PAGER
export PAGER=nvimpager
man bash
git diff

The script also has a "cat mode" which will not start up the neovim interface but instead print a highlighted version of the file to the terminal. Like cat with neovim syntax highlighting! If the input has less lines than the terminal cat mode is activated automatically so nvimpager behaves similar to less -F. Pager mode and cat mode can be enforced with the options -p and -c respectively.

Nvimpager comes with a small set of command line options but you can also use all of neovim's command line options. Use nvimpager -h to see the help text. Config files are searched as for plain neovim with the only difference that ~/.config/nvimpager is searched instead of ~/.config/nvim (same for ~/.local/share/nvimpager and the $XDG_..._HOME variants). In short: the user config file is ~/.config/nvimpager/init.vim.

Technical stuff

Dependencies

• neovim
• bash
• a POSIX compatible ps implementation
• (curl during installation)

Installation instructions

Use the makefile to install the script and its dependencies. It supports the usual PREFIX (defaults to /usr/local) and DESTDIR (defaults to empty) variables:

make PREFIX=$HOME/.local install

Development

Nvimpager is developed on Github where you are very much invited to post bug reports, feature or pull requests!

Known Bugs (and non features)

• if reading from stdin, nvimpager (like nvim) waits for EOF until it starts up
• large files are slowing down neovim on startup (less does a better, i.e. faster and more memory efficient job at paging large files)

TODO List

• write a man page (or vim help file)
• show a short message in the cmdline like less and vimpager do (file and help information)
• see how neovim#7428 is resolved and maybe move more code (logic) from bash to vimscript
• check if terminal buffers can be used to render ansi escape codes, alternatively ...
• check license options for bundling the AnsiEsc plugin
• implement some more keybindings that make it behave more like less
• see what parts can reasonably be implemented in lua (speed improvement?)
• proper lazy pipe reading while paging (like less) to improve startup time and also memory usage for large input on pipes

License

The project is licensed under a BSD-2-clause license. See the LICENSE file.