Install Neovim on Ubuntu

2024-11-05 2024-11-05 productivityvimlinuxpost

In this short tutorial, I’ll show you how to install Neovim on Ubuntu in three different ways 1) from a precompiled binary, 2) using Ubuntu’s package manager and 3) from source code.

Download the binary

wget -c https://github.com/neovim/neovim/releases/latest/download/nvim-linux64.tar.gz
tar xvf nvim-linux64.tar.gz
sudo mv nvim-linux64 /usr/local/nvim
cd /usr/local/bin
sudo ln -svf ../nvim/bin/nvim nvim

Now, you should be able to run nvim on the command line.

Use the package manager

Neovim has been in the Ubuntu’s package archive for a while, so you can simply use the following command:

sudo apt install neovim

While this method is the easiest, it might not get you the latest version.

Build from source code

By building from the source code, you can get the latest version available, but it requires installing a few dependencies and running a few commands.

sudo apt-get install ninja-build gettext cmake unzip curl
git clone https://github.com/neovim/neovim
cd neovim && git checkout stable
make CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
sudo make install

There you are, if everything went well, you should have the latest (though stable) version of Neovim.

For other platforms, see the official documentation.