buffer-preview.nvim

Give your Neovim buffers real previews instead of raw file bytes.

buffer-preview.nvim hijacks the normal buffer read for supported files and replaces raw bytes with a read-only, navigable in-buffer preview. Keep the document inside Neovim, move with familiar Vim keys, and avoid context-switching to a separate viewer.

Requirements

• Neovim >= 0.10
• image.nvim (handles image rendering)
• ImageMagick (required by image.nvim)
• pdftoppm or pdftocairo (from poppler / poppler-utils)
• pdfinfo (from poppler / poppler-utils)

Optional: presentation

• soffice for presentation preview conversion (.pptx, .ppt, .odp)

Optional: tmux support

~/.tmux.conf

# https://github.com/3rd/image.nvim#tmux
set -gq allow-passthrough on
set -g visual-activity off
set -g focus-events on

Installation

With lazy.nvim:

{
  "propilideno/buffer-preview.nvim",
  event = { "BufReadCmd *.pdf", "BufReadCmd *.pptx", "BufReadCmd *.ppt", "BufReadCmd *.odp" }, -- fires before Neovim reads the file, earlier than ft
  dependencies = { "3rd/image.nvim" },
  opts = {},
}

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S poppler imagemagick \
               libreoffice-fresh # Optional: for presentation preview

Ubuntu / Debian

sudo apt install poppler-utils imagemagick \
                 libreoffice # Optional: for presentation preview

Default Configuration

All fields are optional. These currently configure the PDF rendering backend.

require("buffer-preview").setup({
  -- "pdftoppm" (default) or "pdftocairo"
  rasterizer = "pdftoppm",
  -- Rasterization DPI (higher = sharper but slower)
  dpi = 200,
  -- Where rendered page PNGs are cached
  cache_dir = vim.fn.stdpath("cache") .. "/buffer-preview.nvim",
})

Features

• buffer-hijacking: supported buffers are hijacked and rendered as previews instead of raw bytes
• page-viewer: read-only buffer with Vim-style page movement
• PDF support (.pdf)
• PowerPoint support (.pptx, .ppt)
• OpenDocument Presentation support (.odp)
• SQLite support
• Parquet support
• Excel support

Navigation

Key	Action
j l ↓ ] } Space Ctrl-d Ctrl-f	Next page
k h ↑ [ { Ctrl-u Ctrl-b	Previous page
g	First page
G	Last page
<number>G	Go to page N
r Ctrl-l	Refresh
q	Close viewer

How It Works

1. BufReadCmd hijacks supported files before Neovim reads their raw bytes.
2. The plugin replaces the file buffer with a read-only scratch buffer.
3. A format-specific backend generates preview data for that buffer.
4. The preview is rendered in-place while normal Neovim navigation remains in control.

For PDFs, the backend:

1. Detects page count with pdfinfo
2. Rasterizes pages to PNG with pdftoppm or pdftocairo
3. Displays the page with image.nvim
4. Uses page-navigation mappings instead of normal text editing

For presentation files (.pptx, .ppt, .odp), the backend:

1. Converts the presentation to PDF with soffice --headless
2. Reuses the same PDF page-count, rasterization, and display pipeline
3. Keeps the same in-buffer navigation and Page layout

Architecture

• plugin/buffer-preview.lua: registers buffer hijacking for supported formats
• lua/buffer-preview/converter.lua: converts presentation files to cached PDF with soffice
• lua/buffer-preview/viewer.lua: PDF preview buffer lifecycle
• lua/buffer-preview/rasterizer.lua: PDF page rasterization and cache
• lua/buffer-preview/display.lua: image rendering via image.nvim
• lua/buffer-preview/config.lua: backend configuration