Features

This should be a standard, fully-featured Neovim GUI. Beyond that there are some visual niceties listed below :)

Ligatures

Supports ligatures and font shaping.

Animated Cursor

Cursor animates into position with a smear effect to improve tracking of cursor position.

Smooth Scrolling

Scroll operations on buffers in neovim will be animated smoothly pixel wise rather than line by line at a time.

Animated Windows

Windows animate into position when they are moved making it easier to see how layout changes happen.

Blurred Floating Windows

The backgrounds of floating windows are blurred improving the visual separation between foreground and background from built in window transparency.

Emoji Support

Font fallback supports rendering of emoji not contained in the configured font.

WSL Support

Neovide supports displaying a full gui window from inside wsl via the --wsl command argument. Communication is passed via standard io into the wsl copy of neovim providing identical experience similar to Visual Studio Code's Remote Editing.

Connecting to an existing Neovim instance

Neovide supports connecting to an already running instance of Neovim through the following communication channels:

• TCP
• Unix domain sockets (Unix-like platforms only)
• Named pipes (Windows only)

This is enabled by specifying the --server <address> command line argument. The address is interpreted as a TCP/IPv4/IPv6 address if it contains a colon :. Otherwise, it's interpreted as a Unix domain socket path on Unix-like systems and as the name of a pipe on Windows systems.

It's possible to quit the GUI while leaving the Neovim instance running by closing the Neovide application window instead of issuing a :q command.

One use case is to attach a GUI running on a local machine to a Neovim instance on a remote machine over the network.

TCP Example

Note that exposing Neovim over TCP, even on localhost, is inherently less secure than using Unix Domain Sockets.

Launch Neovim as a TCP server (on port 6666) by running:

nvim --headless --listen localhost:6666

And then connect to it using:

/path/to/neovide --server=localhost:6666

By specifying to listen on localhost, you only allow connections from your local computer. If you are actually doing this over a network you will want to use SSH port forwarding for security, and then connect as before.

ssh -L 6666:localhost:6666 ip.of.other.machine nvim --headless --listen localhost:6666

Unix Domain Socket Example

Launch a Neovim instance listening on a Unix Domain Socket:

nvim --headless --listen some-existing-dir/my-nvim-instance.sock

And then connect to it using:

/path/to/neovide --server=some-existing-dir/my-nvim-instance.sock

Like TCP sockets, Unix Domain Sockets can be forwarded over SSH. Start a Neovim instance on another host with:

ssh -L /path/to/local/socket:/path/to/remote/socket ip.of.other.machine \
    nvim --headless --listen /path/to/remote/socket

Then connect with:

/path/to/neovide --server=/path/to/local/socket

Windows Named Pipes Example

Launch a Neovim instances listening on a Named Pipe:

nvim --headless --listen //./pipe/some-known-pipe-name/with-optional-path

And then connect to it using:

/path/to/neovide --server=some-known-pipe-name/with-optional-path

Note: the pipe name passed to nvim must be prefixed with //./pipe/ but the server argument to Neovide will add it if it is missing.

Some Nonsense ;)

To learn how to configure the following, head on over to the configuration section!

Railgun

Torpedo

Pixiedust

Sonic Boom

Ripple

Wireframe