Written by Jamie Tanna
on 
CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 Apache-2.0
1 mins

Automagically formatting on save, with Neovim and Language Server Protocol (LSP)

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Moving to Neovim, one of the really key benefits of the move was the native Language Server Protocol (LSP) support.

After being quite used to the way that I could get my Java projects to autoformat on build, I did, however, want a little more from Neovim's configuration.

The Neovim docs actually highlight this:

autocmd BufWritePre <buffer> lua vim.lsp.buf.format()
" or
autocmd BufWritePre * lua vim.lsp.buf.format()

Or if you're using the Lua configuration:

vim.cmd [[autocmd BufWritePre <buffer> lua vim.lsp.buf.format()]]
-- or
vim.cmd [[autocmd BufWritePre * lua vim.lsp.buf.format()]]

Or if you want to write Lua, but haven't yet fully migrated to a Lua-only configuration, you'll want the following:

lua <<EOF
vim.cmd [[autocmd BufWritePre * lua vim.lsp.buf.format()]]
EOF

Then, every time you save your file(s), they'll attempt to format using the registered LSP, and if none exist, it'll be a no-op.

Written by Jamie Tanna's profile image Jamie Tanna on , and last updated on .

Content for this article is shared under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International, and code is shared under the Apache License 2.0.

#blogumentation #neovim.

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