69 lines
3.8 KiB
Text
69 lines
3.8 KiB
Text
---
|
|
title: "cp.nvim"
|
|
slug: "cp.nvim"
|
|
date: "10/10/2025"
|
|
---
|
|
|
|
Things have changed since I last documented my competitive programming setup [here](/software/my-competitive-programming-setup.html).
|
|
|
|
# my goals
|
|
|
|
After many months of using the aforementioned `make` based setup, I had a few qualms:
|
|
|
|
- <u>I'm lazy</u>: I grew tired of copying (and mis-copying) inputs, outputs,
|
|
etc from online judges.
|
|
- <u>I'm lazy</u>: I frequently submitted incorrect solutions after erroneously
|
|
asserting that my outputs matched those of the sample test cases
|
|
- <u>External dependencies</u>: it unsettles me that my bare-bones setup
|
|
required copy-pasting an entire suite of scripts
|
|
- <u>Non-native NeoVim experience</u>: while composition and the UNIX philosophy
|
|
are great, there's only so much you can do with pipes and files. - Raw I/O
|
|
files meant I couldn't see colored stdin/stdout - Fine-grained per-testcase
|
|
I/O was suspect--isolating and running a subset of test cases required manual
|
|
intervention
|
|
|
|
The solution was to leverage Neovim's great APIs to give me granular control over every aspect of my problem-solving experience.
|
|
|
|
# the solution: cp.nvim
|
|
|
|
The GitHub page documents the plugin well enough so I'll avoid re-hashing it here. Instead, what's more interesting to document is why I thought this was a worthwhile experience.
|
|
|
|
1. <u>Making Something Useful for Others</u>: cp.nvim is an opportunity for me
|
|
to make my first open-source project "right"--not some side project or demo,
|
|
but a *real*, usable tool that I'll be rolling out to the public soon. I
|
|
consider the following in my active development of the plugin:
|
|
|
|
- Comprehensive continuous integration (_real_ testing, linting, and more)
|
|
- [LuaRocks](https://luarocks.org/) integration (the future of NeoVim package management)
|
|
- Concise and thorough Vimdoc documentation that communicates effectively
|
|
- Modern lua tooling: use of [busted](https://lunarmodules.github.io/busted/), [selene](https://kampfkarren.github.io/selene/) and more integrated with the NeoVim lua interpreter
|
|
- Sensible user defaults & extreme customization
|
|
- Proper versioning, tagging, and releases
|
|
|
|
2. <u>The Neovim Community</u>: I'm elated to finally give back to the community
|
|
(even if no one uses this plugin). [folke](https://github.com/folke),
|
|
[bfredl](https://github.com/bfredl), and
|
|
[echasnovski](https://github.com/echasnovski) are my greatest inspirations as
|
|
an open-source developer and I've had enough of taking without giving back.
|
|
|
|
- In the coming months I plan to contribute to [NeoVim core](https://github.com/neovim/neovim), including making `:checkhealth` asynchronous and integrating an [mdx](https://mdxjs.com/) parser.
|
|
|
|
3. <u>Learning Random things</u>: I think this plugin is *really* cool by virtue
|
|
of its efficacy and the miscellany of knowledge I accrued in the 15k+ LOC as
|
|
of version v0.3.0. Some things I learned include:
|
|
|
|
- <u>ANSI terminal colors and escape codes</u>: I wrote my own stateful ANSI
|
|
escape sequence parser to map raw bytes to native NeoVim highlighted text
|
|
- <u>Extmarks</u>: NeoVim extmarks (`:h extmarks`) are extremely powerful. Here,
|
|
I used them to apply dynamic highlighting across various components of the
|
|
plugin but I also plan to leverage virtual text to catch compile errors in
|
|
real-time
|
|
- <u>VIM filetypes and diffing</u>: Vim is strange and the event-based system is
|
|
fragile. I faced filetype detection race conditions and odd side effects of
|
|
functions (such as `:diffthis` resetting `foldcolumn`).
|
|
- <u>[LuaCATS](https://github.com/LuaCATS)</u>: apparently writing comments is
|
|
the best way to typecheck in lua...
|
|
- <u>The (Neo)Vim event loop</u>: Scraper subprocesses spawned with
|
|
`vim.system`. Though a powerful API, I often had to obey the event loop and
|
|
wrap side effects with `vim.schedule` to ensure they ran after jobs finished.
|
|
This was useful to defer UI updates.
|