From Nano to Neovim A Raspberry Pi Setup Adventure

I’m setting up my Raspberry Pi as a media server, and I’ve got an old LED TV—basically a "dumb" TV. Adding this setup will definitely make it smart, haha!

After installing Raspbian OS, I tried using Nano, but I couldn’t stand it for long. I need Vim. I need Neovim. I just couldn’t go on like that, so I visited the Neovim website. However, there are no precompiled binaries for the Raspberry Pi. The repository works, but the version is 0.7.x, which definitely won’t cut it.

So, compiling it from source was the only option. Here are the steps I followed:

Clone the Neovim repository:

1git clone https://github.com/neovim/neovim.git

Navigate to the Neovim directory:

1cd neovim

Build Neovim:

1make CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo

Move into the build directory:

1cd build

Package it as a DEB file:

1cpack -G DEB

Install the DEB package:

1sudo dpkg -i nvim-linux64.deb

After watching the terminal scroll for a while, boom! We now have the latest Neovim running on the Raspberry Pi. I love Linux!

If you have never tried compiling an application from source this could be a good place to start

PS: I was missing one dependency "gettext" which I had to install after the linking phase failed