As mentioned in a previous post, while experimenting with Fedora Atomic Desktops I largely switched to using containers for my development environments. This came with some mild friction with my editor setup, as the Neovim ecosystem doesn’t really support container-aware development. Until recently, my solution was to first install Neovim in each development container, then convince Neovide (my frontend of choice) to use the container binary instead of the system binary using its --neovim-bin flag. While I’m still installing Neovim in all of my dev containers,1 I’ve added some convenience scripts for launching Neovide that I thought were worth sharing.

Launcher Script Link to heading

My goal was to add an (optional) launcher menu for Neovide that would allow me to pick from a list of Distrobox containers on my system, then adjust the nvim invokation based on the selection. At the core of this is a quick and dirty Bash script leveraging kdialog2.

First, I grab a list of container names managed by Distrobox. Due to a quirk with kdialog’s CLI, I also transform this into a list of options with each container name listed twice:

containers=$(distrobox list --no-color) | awk 'NR>1 {print $3}')

options=()
while IFS= read -r container; do
  options+=("$container" "$container") 
done <<< "$containers"

Next, I use kdialog to present a menu and get a choice from the user:

choice=$(kdialog --menu "Select a container to open Neovim" "${options[@]}")

Finally, I start Neovide, replacing the default Neovim path with a Distrobox command to launch nvim inside of the target container. I also transparently pass any other arguments (most often a filename to open):

exec neovide --neovim-bin "distrobox enter $choice -- nvim" $@

The container selection menu in action

Desktop Integration Link to heading

To tie everything together, I added an action to the XDG desktop entry provided with Neovide that invokes the script. This required adding a list of Actions to the [Desktop Entry] tag, then a definition for my custom action at the end of the file.

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=neovide %F
Icon=neovide
Name=Neovide
Keywords=Text;Editor;
Categories=Utility;TextEditor;
Comment=No Nonsense Neovim Client in Rust
MimeType=text/english;text/plain;text/x-makefile;text/x-c++hdr;text/x-c++src;text/x-chdr;text/x-csrc;text/x-java;text/x-moc;text/x-pascal;text/x-tcl;text/x-tex;application/x-shellscript;text/x-c;text/x-c++;
Actions=OpenInContainer;

[Desktop Action OpenInContainer]
Name=Open in Container
Exec=${HOME}/.local/bin/neovide-distrobox %F

To avoid the package manager clobbering my changes, I save the resulting .desktop file to ~/.local/share/applications/, and run update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications to immediately force an update in my desktop environment. Right-clicking the entry now includes a “Open in Container” option that uses the launcher script.

Now, Neovide is (sort of) container-aware!

Further Reading Link to heading

  1. Given the size of a Neovim install, I don’t see a reason to try and eliminate this. ↩︎

  2. This is mostly because I’m using KDE at the moment; the script could easily be modified to instead use zenity, dmenu, or any other GUI menu tool. ↩︎