Neovim ❤️ LuaRocks

Neorocks aims at encouraging good software practice in the neovim plugin ecosystem,

One major addition in nvim compared to vim is the native support of an existing scripting language aka Lua, with numerous packages available (yaml/json loaders, testing libraries like busted etc)

This favors code reuse, a rare sight in vimscript land, and makes it possible for plugin to focus on their primary objective, without reinventing the wheel.

These dependencies can be installed via the historical Lua package manager www.luarocks.org. We want to encourage plugin authors to specify their plugin dependencies in the luarocks package format: aka rockspec (see the rocks.nvim rockspec for an example).

This allows to shift the burden of specifying plugin dependencies from the users to the plugin authors. The plugin author can change the plugin dependencies without breaking its users configurations. Fewer support issues it is a win-win ! And between our github action and our own repository of luarocks package definitions, it has never been easier to publish a package to luarocks.org.

We at neorocks want to promote the semantic versioning of plugins: instead of blindly cloning plugins from git with the hope the update does not break one's own config, pin the plugin version. For instance rocks.nvim asks you if you really want to update a plugin with a major version change.

We encourage plugin authors to test their plugins now that luarocks provides good testing libraries like busted. It has never been this easy to test your plugin using neovim as a lua interpreter with nlua.

Our member @mrcjkb also explains why entangling installation and configuration makes plugin manager work harder. He also published a guide on good practice for neovim plugin development.