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Neovim and .NET

Wed Jul 21 2021

screenshot of nvim

Just before I went on summer vacation, I spent the last week writing .NET code in Neovim. In the 0.5 release of Neovim they've added native support for the Language Server Protocol (LSP), which means that you can get go-to-definition, find-references, completion, and other neat features directly in Neovim.

I'm not a big fan of big clunky IDEs such as Visual Studio, so returning to vim as my daily driver has been on my wish list ever since I started at my current job. However, since I'm no C# and .NET maestro yet, features such as auto completions and finding references is almost necessary for me to have set up in my editor when I'm working in large enterprise codebases.

With WSL, the Windows Terminal, and Neovim it's now absolutely possible to get a great developer experience writing .NET apps on Windows (sort of) without ever leaving the terminal. One week in, I'm really impressed.

Here's a short description of what I did to get everything set up. If you've already set up a dev environment in WSL or Ubuntu, skip to step 5.

  1. Install the Windows Terminal
  2. Install WSL
  3. Download and install Ubuntu 20.04 in WSL
  4. Install the .NET SDK.
  5. Install Neovim. I opted for the Homebrew-route since I'm familiar with brew from my mac.
  6. Install the OmniSharp language server. I downloaded a binary and put it in ~/bin.
  7. Install nvim-lspconfig that launches and initializes LSP servers.
  8. Add the necessary config to your init.nvim to get the keybindings and completions set up. For more details, take a look at the keybindings and completion section in the nvim-config/README.md. Remember to put omnisharp-roslyn in the local severs = {} array!
  9. Configure nvim to launch OmniSharp, in other words, point it to where you installed Omnisharp (~/bin on my machine).

When you've gone through these steps, you'll get language support for C# and .NET directly in Neovim, and you can do all your development work in the Windows terminal!

After two weeks of every-day use, I'm really impressed with the developer experience in Neovim with LSP support from Omnisharp. It just works!

If you have any issues setting this up yourself, feel free to reach out to me!