Neovide is great. The animations in particular make it feel fun to work with. Kitty recently implemented a cursor trail but it's only 90% of the way there. And it's still missing the blur, slide animations and other stuff in neovide.

There was a discussion here about implementing a general purpose terminal: #1875

I've been playing around with doing so and thought I'd share my config.

Aims

• Act like a normal terminal
• Use neovim's window/tab management for a terminal multiplexer

Limitations

Everything will have to be done through neovim's terminal feature.

Implementation

1. Make neovide start nvim in terminal mode. That can be done with these autocmds in your neovim config:

    ## this one is optional to make terminals start in insert mode
    autocmd TermOpen * startinsert
    ## And these start nvim with a terminal, (I needed the extra startinsert despite the above)
    autocmd VimEnter * silent! execute 'term'
    autocmd VimEnter * silent! startinsert

2. Override the nvim command so that it sets the CWD in the running nvim instance.

The idea here is that the shell command nvim is context-aware. If it's running inside an nvim terminal, have it set nvim's CWD. I'm using fish shell so I added the following to my config, it would be simple enough to port to bash/zsh:

    set -x originalnvim (which nvim)
    function nvimStart
      if count $argv > /dev/null
        set open ":e $argv"
      else 
        set open ":Alpha"
      end
      if set -q NVIM
          $originalnvim --server $NVIM --remote-send "<C-\\><C-N>:silent tcd $PWD<CR>$open<CR>"
      else
        $originalnvim $argv
      end
    end
    alias nvim='nvimStart'

This does a few things:

1. If it's not running inside an nvim terminal, launch nvim normally
2. If it is running inside nvim (ie inside nvim within neovide), set the PWD for the running instance to the PWD of the terminal and start the greeter. For me this is :Alpha, replace that with the command that starts your greeter.
3. If a file is specified e.g. nvim file.txt it opens the file (it won't support any other launch options like nvim -c

That way you can do exactly as you do in a normal terminal

cd my/project
nvim
# or
cd my/project
nvim file.txt

That's all you need really ,the rest is normal nvim config.

For completeness, here's my config for multiplexing which mimics my kitty setup. Alt+Return opens a new tab, Alt+Space opens a horizonal split, and Alt+Left/Right moves between tabs

    vim.keymap.set('n', '<A-Left>', '<CMD>:tabprev<CR>')
    vim.keymap.set('i', '<A-Left>', '<CMD>:tabprev<CR>')
    vim.keymap.set('t', '<A-Left>', '<CMD>:tabprev<CR>')
    vim.keymap.set('n', '<A-Right>', '<CMD>:tabnext<CR>')
    vim.keymap.set('i', '<A-Right>', '<CMD>:tabnext<CR>')
    vim.keymap.set('t', '<A-Right>', '<CMD>:tabnext<CR>')

    vim.keymap.set('n', '<A-Space>', '<Cmd>:split +term +startinsert<CR>')
    vim.keymap.set('i', '<A-Space>', '<Cmd>:split +term<CR>')
    vim.keymap.set('t', '<A-Space>', '<Cmd>:split +term<CR>')

    vim.keymap.set('n', '<A-Return>', '<Cmd>:tabnew +term<CR>')
    vim.keymap.set('i', '<A-Return>', '<Cmd>:tabnew +term<CR>')
    vim.keymap.set('t', '<A-Return>', '<Cmd>:tabnew +term<CR>')

    vim.keymap.set('n', '<A-q>', '<Cmd>:tabclose<CR>')
    vim.keymap.set('i', '<A-q>', '<Cmd>:tabclose<CR>')
    vim.keymap.set('t', '<A-q>', '<Cmd>:tabclose<CR>')

Issues/limitations

I'll point out these are neovim issues, not neovide's

• Some commands don't seem scroll down enough after they run so you end up at the top
• It would be nice if you could use normal mode commands to edit a command e.g. type a command then bbciw to change a word. That doesn't work so you'll still need an implementation in your shell for that
• I haven't tried anything outside of neovim itself that require exotic key combinations, I don't know how well applications like Mutt would work that have to share neovim key binds
• Obviously this ends up being Neovide > Neovim > Terminal > Shell which is an extra layer of complexity
• You can run tmux/zellij inside it and it seems to work fine (I only tested zellij with a few panes) but you can't then run nvim inside it because all the keybinds conflict. It would be interesting to see if there was a way to load a minimal config with zero keybinds for the outer nvim and your full config for the inner one, but that already feels super hacky so you're stuck with nvims window management (which is fine for me)

Benefits

Being able to navigate the scroll buffer using native vim motions (Ctrl-O for normal mode and navigate away).
Marks in the scroll buffer!
Smooth scrolling and cursor animation work surprisingly well
One set of configuration, I don't need to sort out my kitty/wezterm/ghostty config/keybinds and my neovim config