My Minimal, Plugin-Free Neovim Setup
Using ripgrep for file finding and grepping
Category: Neovim
Stripped Down and Dialed In
This post documents my plugin-free Neovim setup... Something that feels like the terminal version of a flip phone. It’s fast, focused, and only does what I tell it to.
You can look at the repository here: github
If you're curious how I manage my neovim version, check out this post.
Why Not Use a Neovim Distro?
Tools like AstroNvim or LazyVim are amazing, don’t get me wrong. They make onboarding super easy and help beginners get productive quickly.
But the downside? They abstract a lot. You lose some of that close-to-the-metal feel.
This setup is intentionally raw. If something isn’t working, it’s probably my fault. And I kind of love that.
Finding Your Own Way in Neovim
When I first started with Neovim, like many others, I did whatever ThePrimeagen told me to do. Keybinds, plugins, the whole kitchen sink.
I copied, I pasted, I rewired my brain to jump between splits like a caffeinated octopus.
But after a while, it all started to feel like noise. The setup became bloated.
Over time, I realized I could do things differently. I could strip it all back, keep only what made sense to me, and ignore the rest.
At some point, you stop watching what others are doing... and you just start building something for yourself.
You Already Have What You Need
You don’t need telescope.nvim, fzf-lua, or neo-tree to be productive.
These tools are impressive, sure — flashy UIs, fuzzy-finding on steroids, built-in previews.
But at the end of the day, they're just wrappers around powerful tools that already exist. ripgrep and find are lightning fast and deeply flexible.
Need to find a file? Pipe rg --files into a quickfix list.
Want to search for a string? rg will never let you down (it's blazingly fast).
Require a file explorer? netrw may look like it’s from 1998 (because it is), but it works.
When you lean into these battle-tested utilities and wire them into your Neovim workflow, you end up with something lean, powerful, and uniquely yours...
No 300-line plugin configs required.