An ivy-mode port to neovim. Ivy is a generic completion mechanism for Emacs Nvim

Installation

Manually

git clone https://github.com/AdeAttwood/ivy.nvim ~/.config/nvim/pack/bundle/start/ivy.nvim

Plugin managers

Using lazy.nvim

{
    "AdeAttwood/ivy.nvim",
    build = "cargo build --release",
},

TODO: Add more plugin managers

Setup / Configuration

Ivy can be configured with minimal config that will give you all the defaults provided by Ivy.

require('ivy').setup()

With Ivy you can configure your own backends.

require('ivy').setup {
  backends = {
    -- A backend module that will be registered
    "ivy.backends.buffers",
    -- Using a table so you can configure a custom keymap overriding the
    -- default one.
    { "ivy.backends.files", { keymap = "<C-p>" } }
  },
}

The setup function can only be called once, if its called a second time any backends or config will not be used. Ivy does expose the register_backend function, this can be used to load backends before or after the setup function is called.

require('ivy').register_backend("ivy.backends.files")

Compiling

For the native searching, you will need to compile the shard library. You can do that by running the below command in the root of the plugin.

cargo build --release

You will need to have the rust toolchain installed. You can find more about that here

If you get a linker error you may need to install build-essential to get ld. This is a common issue if you are running the benchmarks in a VM

error: linker `cc` not found
  |
  = note: No such file or directory (os error 2)

To configure auto compiling you can use the post-merge git hook to compile the library automatically when you update the package. This works well if you are managing your plugins via git. For an example installation you can run the following command. NOTE: This will overwrite any post-merge hooks you have already installed.

cp ./post-merge.sample ./.git/hooks/post-merge

Features

Backends

A backend is a module that will provide completion candidates for the UI to show. It will also provide functionality when actions are taken. The Command and Key Map are the default options provided by the backend, they can be customized when you register it.

Module	Command	Key Map	Description
ivy.backends.files	IvyFd	<leader>p	Find files in your project with a custom rust file finder
ivy.backends.ag	IvyAg	<leader>/	Find content in files using the silver searcher
ivy.backends.rg	IvyRg	<leader>/	Find content in files using ripgrep cli tool
ivy.backends.buffers	IvyBuffers	<leader>b	Search though open buffers
ivy.backends.lines	IvyLines		Search the lines in the current buffer
ivy.backends.lsp-workspace-symbols	IvyWorkspaceSymbol		Search for workspace symbols using the lsp workspace/symbol

Actions

Action can be run on selected candidates provide functionality

Action	Key Map	Description
Complete	<CR>	Run the completion function, usually this will be opening a file
Vertical Split	<C-v>	Run the completion function in a new vertical split
Split	<C-s>	Run the completion function in a new split
Destroy	<C-c>	Close the results window
Clear	<C-u>	Clear the results window
Delete word	<C-w>	Delete the word under the cursor
Next	<C-n>	Move to the next candidate
Previous	<C-p>	Move to the previous candidate
Next Checkpoint	<C-M-n>	Move to the next candidate and keep Ivy open and focussed
Previous Checkpoint	<C-M-n>	Move to the previous candidate and keep Ivy open and focussed

Add your own keymaps for an action by adding a ftplugin/ivy.lua file in your config. Just add a simple keymap like this:

vim.api.nvim_set_keymap( "n", "<esc>", "<cmd>lua vim.ivy.destroy()<CR>", { noremap = true, silent = true, nowait = true })

API

ivy.run

The ivy.run function is the core function in the plugin, it will launch the completion window and display the items from your items function. When the users accept one of the candidates with an action, it will call the callback function to in most cases open the item in the desired location.

  ---@param name string
  ---@param items fun(input: string): { content: string }[] | string
  ---@param callback fun(result: string, action: string)
  vim.ivy.run = function(name, items, callback) end

Name string

The name is the display name for the command and will be the name of the buffer in the completion window

Items fun(input: string): { content: string }[] | string

The items function is a function that will return the candidates to display in the completion window. This can return a string where each line will be a completion item. Or an array of tables where the content will be the completion item.

Callback fun(result: string, action: string)

The function that will run when the user selects a completion item. Generally this will open the item in the desired location. For example, in the file finder with will open the file in a new buffer. If the user selects the vertical split action it will open the buffer in a new vsplit

Example

  vim.ivy.run(
    -- The name given to the results window and displayed to the user
    "Title",
    -- Call back function to get all the candidates that will be displayed in
    -- the results window, The `input` will be passed in, so you can filter
    -- your results with the value from the prompt
    function(input)
      return {
        { content = "One" },
        { content = "Two" },
        { content = "Three" },
      }
    end,
    -- Action callback that will be called on the completion or checkpoint actions.
    -- The currently selected item is passed in as the result.
    function(result) vim.cmd("edit " .. result) end
  )

Benchmarks

Benchmarks are of various tasks that ivy will do. The purpose of the benchmarks are to give us a baseline on where to start when trying to optimize performance in the matching and sorting, not to put ivy against other tools. When starting to optimize, you will probably need to get a baseline on your hardware.

There are fixtures provided that will create the directory structure of the kubernetes source code, from somewhere around commit sha 985c9202ccd250a5fe22c01faf0d8f83d804b9f3. This will create a directory tree of 23511 files a relative large source tree to get a good idea of performance. To create the source tree under /tmp/ivy-trees/kubernetes run the following command. This will need to be run for the benchmarks to run.

# Create the source trees
bash ./scripts/fixtures.bash

# Run the benchmark script
luajit ./scripts/benchmark.lua

Current benchmark status running on a e2-standard-2 2 vCPU + 8 GB memory VM running on GCP.

IvyRs (Lua)

Name	Total	Average	Min	Max
ivy_match(file.lua) 1000000x	04.153531 (s)	00.000004 (s)	00.000003 (s)	00.002429 (s)
ivy_files(kubernetes) 100x	03.526795 (s)	00.035268 (s)	00.021557 (s)	00.037127 (s)

IvyRs (Criterion)

Name	Min	Mean	Max
ivy_files(kubernetes)	19.727 ms	19.784 ms	19.842 ms
ivy_match(file.lua)	2.6772 µs	2.6822 µs	2.6873 µs

CPP

Name	Total	Average	Min	Max
ivy_match(file.lua) 1000000x	01.855197 (s)	00.000002 (s)	00.000001 (s)	00.000177 (s)
ivy_files(kubernetes) 100x	14.696396 (s)	00.146964 (s)	00.056604 (s)	00.168478 (s)

Other stuff you might like

• ivy-mode - An emacs package that was the inspiration for this nvim plugin
• Command-T - Vim plugin I used before I started this one
• telescope.nvim - Another competition plugin, lots of people are using