I’m going to show you how to use Neovim on Gitpod. This can be useful for checking and testing your Neovim configuration.

The example can be found here: https://github.com/LorenzoBettini/neovim-gitpod-example.

I’m using a LazyVim distribution as a demonstration.

The Gitpod custom Dockerfile, “.gitpod.Dockerfile”, must be tweaked to install Neovim and its requirements (especially for using Lazyvim):

Then, the file “.gitpod.yml” must be tweaked accordingly; in particular, I’m using “stow” to create a symlink for the default Neovim configuration directory using as the source the configuration directory of this repository (you could also simply use the “ln” command for that):

The “stow.sh” script is part of the repository. I also specify a few extensions to install in the VScode of Gitpod.

Note that the first time, it will take a few minutes for Gitpod to provision such a Docker image.

Once in Gitpod, we can see that the link has been already configured:

Now, let’s enlarge the Terminal view and start Neovim.

We should see Neovim is installing all the packages as configured by LazyVim:

Note the change of the default color scheme:

Let’s close the Lazy window and see the Dashboard:

Since I’m using a light theme for the VScode, upon restarting Neovim, the color scheme is changed to its light variant as well:

We can now open the explorer (“space e”) to browse the contents:

By default, we have the Lua LSP installed.

We can use the file picker (“space f”):

We can use Lua LSP features like code completion:

And hover (“K”):

And change the color scheme with the picker (“space u C”):

Note that there are a few things that are not working correctly in Gitpod concerning Neovim:

• Clipboard does not work since there’s no “DISPLAY” set.
• Missing nerd fonts, things like folders and file types in the explorer, are not rendered correctly.

That’s all!