Adding a package to generate a portable lua config

[DataHearth]

Hey!
After playing a little bit with nixvim-print-init, I thought, why not improve this mechanism to generate a portable neovim configuration from nixvim. The nixvim-print-init package is primarily meant for debugging or checking the generated config, if I understand it correctly.
But it doesn't allow the user to export it and use it without importing every single packages by hand (in a package manager like lazy or packer).

Could this be a good feature/package for Nixvim? I'm willing to put effort in this, as I could use it at work and still keep my nixvim config for my daily driver ^^.

[MattSturgeon]

I've had the same idea in the past, but I'm skeptical it is possible to achieve in a sane way.

Nixvim is designed from the ground up to use plugins packaged in nixpkgs. We use the nixpkgs nvim wrapper to add those packages to vim's runtimepath. We occasionally rely on nix store paths for arbitrary dependencies. Etc.

Let's say you used a plugin manager like lazy.nvim to download the plugins instead of adding nix packages directly to the runtimepath. With this approach, we would have to maintain some metadaata for each plugin so that we know what plugin name (repo, etc) we should ask lazy.nvim to install.

There'd also be other things that'd need some refactoring, possibly including how we handle extraFiles.

Don't let my skepticism put you off though, if you think you have an idea for something that could work.

[DataHearth]

I'll check what I can do. My initial thought was:
we already have a working version of init.lua generated when not compiled into byte code (if I understood the code correctly). When generating it, maybe it can fetch the package information (owner/repo + commit) and then just tell lazy.nvim to use it with the compiled config.

This is my first idea. I'll try to do a POC to check if this could be viable or even achieved without too much hassle.