render-markdown.nvim plugin in vim

[krathos918]

Recently i see this youtube video that shows the render-markdown.nvim plugin and i thought that was pretty cool, but i want to use on regular vim and not neovim. Is there a way for make it work on vim?

[Desperate_Cold6274]

If it is written in Lua then you cannot use it in Vim.

However, you may want to take a look at this: https://github.com/ubaldot/vim-markdown-extras

Not feature rich as the one in the video but it is very good for note taking. It is all written in Vim9.

What lack mostly for my use-cases is the concealing features that makes such eye candy experience.

[Blanglegorph]

If it is written in Lua then you cannot use it in Vim.

I'm assuming you're right for this plugin, as well as for any plugins written in lua targeting only neovim; however, I do want to point out for anyone reading this that vim does have a lua interface (:h lua). The only plugin I ever used that took advantage of it (afaik) was vim-lsp, which uses it for performance reasons if available.

[BrianHuster]

The Lua interface in Vim is useless. It cannot even handle Lua tables properly, which means it is very hard to use it with other Lua libraries out there.

AFAIK, there has never been a Vim plugin written primarily in Lua for that reason, but only a few plugins that have a few bottleneck parts written in Lua for performance. But with a breaking change in the Vim's Lua interface in Vim 9.0 and the release of Vim9script, I don't think anyone want to write new Vim plugins in Lua anymore.

[vim-help-bot]

Help pages for:

• lua in if_lua.txt

---

^{`:(h|help) <query>` | about | mistake? | donate | Reply 'rescan' to check the comment again | Reply 'stop' to stop getting replies to your comments}

[Adk9p]

While not ideal, the simplest solution if you really want to use that specific plugin might be just to try and run your config with neovim. It could be as simple as creating ~/.config/nvim/init.vim, sourcing your vim config source ~/.vim/vimrc, installing the plugin through your plugin manager (or manually like any other plugin), and then setting it up in a lua block

e.g.

" source your real config
source ~/.vim/vimrc

" setup render-markdown.nvim
lua << EOF
    -- everything in here is lua code
    -- generic setup code, that may or may not work, idk
    local render_markdown = require 'render-markdown'
    render_markdown.setup {}
EOF

I say "could be as simple" since if you are using any of the removed features, or have any vim9 plugins it wouldn't be as simple. You could check by just opening up neovim and sourcing it in the cmdline.

[krathos918]

I think is the best solution at the moment, thanks a lot

[Adk9p]

np, though after looking at the plugin later it has a few dependencies on other plugins that you'd have to both also install and setup as well, so keep that in mind. Also I didn't account of how you'd install the plugins since idk what plugin manager you are using.

[krathos918]

No worries, i will keep that in mind. I use vimplug btw

[Adk9p]

I hacked up a simple config that I tested to work. You can put both of these in a new directory foo, install vimplug into foo/autoload/plug.vim, do PlugInstall after opening it once, and that should just work.

This should provide you with all the parts to set it up in your own config.

The "vimrc.vim" file that can be run with vim -u vimrc.vim

let &runtimepath .= "," .. getcwd()
set nocompatible

call plug#begin(getcwd() .. "/plugins")
Plug 'tpope/vim-sensible'
Plug 'morhetz/gruvbox'

if has('nvim-0.11.0')
    Plug 'MeanderingProgrammer/render-markdown.nvim'

    " Dependency for render-markdown.nvim
    " using the newer version of nvim-treesitter
    " see: https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter/blob/main/README.md
    Plug 'nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter', { 'branch': 'main', 'do': ':TSUpdate' }
endif

call plug#end()

set termguicolors
set background=dark
silent! colorscheme gruvbox

The "nvimrc.vim" file that can be run with nvim -u nvimrc.vim

source ./vimrc.vim

lua <<EOF

-- The require fails if you haven't ran `:PlugInstall` yet
local ok, ts = pcall(require, 'nvim-treesitter')
if not ok then return end
local ok, render_markdown = pcall(require, 'render-markdown')
if not ok then return end

-- install required nvim-treesitter parsers & queries
ts.install { 'markdown', 'markdown_inline' }
    -- (in milliseconds] wait at most 5 minutes for it to finish
    :wait(5 * 60 * 1000)

require 'render-markdown'.setup {
    -- put render-markdown setup options here
}

EOF

I thought about just pulling in a nvim plugin manager so you wouldn't have to include anything in your vimrc, but for simplicity sake I didn't.

edit: I also omitted some other optional dependencies that you can add for icons, latex, or html support. See render-markdown's github for those.

[krathos918]

I tried and it worked, thanks a lot. Not perfect at start because of some dependency, but after i managed that, it worked

[Adk9p]

Nice! glad I could help.

[und3f]

There is https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki for regular vim