Jonathan Dowland: nvim-µwiki

In January 2025,
as a pre-requisite for something else, I published a minimal neovim
plugin called nvim-µwiki. It’s essentially just the features from
vimwiki that I regularly use, which is a small fraction them.
I forgot to blog about it. I recently dusted it off and cleaned it up.
You can find it here, along with a longer list of its features and
how to configure it: https://github.com/jmtd/nvim-microwiki

I had a couple of design goals. I didn’t want to define a new filetype,
so this is designed to work with the existing markdown one. I’m
using neovim, so I wanted to leverage some of its features: this plugin
is written in Lua, rather than vimscript. I use the parse trees
provided by TreeSitter to navigate the structure of a document.
I also decided to “plug into” the existing tag stack navigation, rather
than define another dimension of navigation (along with buffers, etc.)
to track: Following a wiki-link pushes onto the tag stack, just as if
you followed a tag.

This was my first serious bit of Lua programming, as well as my first
dive into neovim (or even vim) internals.
Lua is quite reasonable. Most
of the vim and neovim architecture is reasonable. The emerging conventions
about structuring neovim plugins are mostly reasonable. TreeSitter is, well,
interesting, but the devil is very much in the details. Somehow all
together the experience for me was largely just frustrating, and I didn’t
really enjoy writing it.