Devcontainer support for Neovim

blog@ensarsarajcic.com (Ensar Sarajčić) — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction</h2>
Ever since I started reading blogs, I always wanted to start writing one myself, but I could not get myself to do it. Reading about how it could help me improve</a> and also seeing open source developers convincing people write one</a>, I figured it could at least help me get better at writing, even if nobody ever reads it.</p>
After making the decision to write a blog post, I had to pick a topic, so for my first blog post ever and I have decided to write about my open source project with the most reach so far, my Neovim plugin for devcontainers</a>. I have initially hosted on GitHub</a>, but later I have decided it's better to host it on a free and open source platform, like Codeberg</a> or Sourcehut</a>. I have still left a mirror on GitHub, since that's where most of Neovim plugins are and where most plugin managers expect to find plugins (even though most of them support other platforms too).</p>

Alternatives</h2>
In 2021, I worked on projects that required me to use containers in my workflow. Looking at available Neovim plugins, the only one I found was nvim-remote-containers</a>, which did not offer much besides starting containers defined in `devcontainer.json</code> file. Even though I did not really have a need for such a plugin anymore, I had some extra time and wanted to try building a proper Neovim plugin (I have madea small one before</a>, but it barely offered any functionality).</p>`

The plugin</h2>
Initial commit</h3>
Looking back at the initial commit</a>,
I guess I just wanted to experiment with idea of embedding Neovim in a container
and connecting to it from current Neovim instance.</p>
Goal of this plugin is to provide functionality similar to
</span>VSCode's </span>[remote container development](https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/containers)
</span>plugin and other functionality that enables development in docker container.
</span>This plugin is inspired by </span>[jamestthompson3/nvim-remote-containers](https://github.com/jamestthompson3/nvim-remote-containers)</span>,
</span>but aims to enable having neovim embedded in docker container.
</span></code></pre>
A lot has changed since then and I have set other goals for the plugin, while
the original one isn't yet completed the way I wanted it initially</a>.</p>
First release</h3>
Two weeks after the initial commit, I had prepared the first release</a>.
It had reached the original goal, but in a hacky way, by attaching to the
container in a terminal buffer and hiding statusline from host Neovim instance,
to make it seem like it's connected directly to the Neovim instance in the
container. That made that feature confusing, since it wasn't clear that
there's an embedded Neovim running, but I hoped that new Neovim release would
make it easy to implement my initial idea</a>.</p>