Every couple of years I make an attempt at using vim as my primary editor. Usually, I fall off after a few days, but I’m going on two weeks now and I’m starting to think it might stick this time. I’m using the LazyVim distribution, which I’m finding both intuitive and well-documented. I also want to give kudos to Dusty Phillips, whose book LazyVim for Ambitious Developers has been extremely helpful.
One thing I find particularly cool about my current setup is smart-splits. This is a neovim plugin that cooperates with the terminal emulator to use the same keyboard shortcuts to move between vim windows and terminal splits. So, if I press Ctrl+h in vim, I’ll move to the next pane to the left—regardless of whether that’s another vim window or a terminal split.
This has been the hardest plugin to get working so far, so I thought I’d document the process in case it helps someone else. We’re using the following setup:
Some of this might still apply if you’re using Wezterm or tmux, but I haven’t tried it.
Step 1: Install the plugin
Create a new lua file in your ~/.config/nvim/lua directory. I called mine smart-splits.lua. Add the following code:
```lua
return {
"mrjones2014/smart-splits.nvim",
build = "./kitty/install-kittens.bash",
lazy = false,
}
The lazy.nvim plugin will notice the new config file the next time you start neovim and install the plugin for you. The build option adds a couple of python scripts to the ~/.config/kitty directory that the plugin needs to work. The lazy option tells lazy.nvim to load the plugin immediately rather than waiting for you to call it. That last bit, lazy = false required a fair bit of time, and help from dotfrag on the LazyVim discussion board to figure out.
Next, choose some keyboard shortcuts to move between windows. I’m using the recommended ones, Ctrl+h, Ctrl+j, Ctrl+k, and Ctrl+l. I am also setting mode = { "n", "i", "v" } to indicate that I want the shortcuts to work in insert and visual modes as well as normal mode.
```lua
return {
"mrjones2014/smart-splits.nvim",
keys = {
{
"<C-h>",
function() require("smart-splits").move_cursor_left() end,
mode = { "i", "n", "v" },
desc = "Move to left window",
},
-- ... similar for the other directions
At this point, you should be able to move your cursor between vim panes, but not yet between vim and terminal splits.
Step 2: Update kitty config
Add the equivalent shortcuts to your kitty config:
map ctrl+j neighboring_window down
map ctrl+k neighboring_window up
map ctrl+h neighboring_window left
map ctrl+l neighboring_window right
# Unset the mapping to pass the keys to neovim
map --when-focus-on var:IS_NVIM ctrl+j
map --when-focus-on var:IS_NVIM ctrl+k
map --when-focus-on var:IS_NVIM ctrl+h
map --when-focus-on var:IS_NVIM ctrl+l
When a neovim window is focused, we want to let the Ctrl+j etc keypresses pass through to neovim. That’s what the second block of map directives does.
At this point, you should be able to move between terminal splits and into neovim splits, but you probably can’t move from a neovim split back to a terminal split. That’s because we haven’t told kitty to allow remote commands yet. Add the following to your kitty.conf:
allow_remote_control yes
listen_on unix:/tmp/mykitty
Restart kitty again and see if it works. I actually found that it didn’t initially (but it does now that I’m writing it 🤷🏻). If it also doesn’t work for you, you can try adding command line flags to allow remote control. Create a file at ~/.config/kitty/macos-launch-services-cmdline and add the following:
-o allow_remote_control=yes --single-instance --listen-on unix:/tmp/mykitty
That did the trick for me.
Thanks again to dotfrag for helping me troubleshoot the smart-splits plugin. If you visit that discussion board page, you’ll see a lot of back and forth and I really appreciate all the time they spent with me.