Installing Neovim on Pop!_OS

Neovim is a modern VIM based text editor that is gaining popularity within the developer community. The Pop!_OS apt repositories contain an old version of Neovim. This article shows how to build and install the latest stable version of Neovim on Pop!_OS.

Full build instructions for Neovim are available on Neovim’s Github repository, but are summarised here is a specific format that can be directly used on Pop!_OS.

Install the build dependencies

There are a few build dependencies required to be able to build Neovim:

$ sudo apt-get install gettext cmake unzip curl build-essential

Checkout the source code

Once your system is ready to build Neovim, get the latest source code via git.

$ git clone https://github.com/neovim/neovim
$ cd neovim
$ git checkout stable

This script checks out the stable branch of Neovim rather than the latest daily build. At the time of writing, the stable build is version 0.9.5

I find it best to check out the stable build rather than the daily build as some of the internal APIs used by Neovim can change, causing instabilities with different plugins.

Build and install

Neovim can be built and installed as a Debian package (.deb), this allows it to be easily uninstalled or upgraded at a later date. To build and install, execute the following:

$ make CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
$ cd build
$ cpack -G DEB
$ sudo dpkg -i nvim-linux64.deb

Uninstall

To uninstall Neovim, uninstall the Debian package.

$ sudo apt remove neovim

Summary

In this article, we’ve seen how to install the latest stable version of Neovim, and optionally the latest daily build. Enjoy and happy developing !

Credits

Neovim logo by Jason Long, available at http://neovim.org/logos/neovim-logos.zip