Neovim on SteamDeck

You love your Steam Deck as I love mine, and you want to do everything on it, like writing that article with Neovim from my Steam machine?

Well, you are in the right place!

Table of contents

• First step: The basic “unlock”
• Second step: Install some generic packages
• Third step: Install Neovim
  • The post you want to read

First step: The basic “unlock”

Let’s open the terminal Konsole.

• If you have not already, use passwd to create a password for the deck user.
• Disable read-only mode: sudo btrfs property set -ts / ro false
• Initialize the pacman keyring: sudo pacman-key --init
• Populate the pacman keyring with the default Arch Linux keys: sudo pacman-key --populate archlinux

Second step: Install some generic packages

These packages that we will install are required for a lot of things to work properly.

• Let’s update our packages with sudo pacman -Syu
• Then install the generic packages with sudo pacman -S base-devel glibc linux-api-headers
• Install a c compiler with sudo pacman -S gcc (Required for TreeSitter)

Third step: Install Neovim

If you don’t necessarily want the latest version of Neovim, well now you can install Neovim with a simple sudo pacman -S neovim and that’s it!

Oh, what? You want an up-to-date Neovim version? Well, I’ll explain to you how with the nvim.appimage file.

• Go to the Neovim GitHub releases page.
• You’ll see at the end of each release block an Assets button to see some files.
• Download the file nvim.appimage.
• Then move and rename the Neovim app image with mv ./nvim.appimage /usr/local/bin/nvim.
• Simply run bash to reload bash config and there you go!

You are now supposed to be able to use nvim.

You may not find the ~/.config/nvim folder. You can simply create it, and it will work if you want some special configuration.

The post you want to read

You may want to take a look at that post talking about NvChad 2.5.