Neovim supports a variety of options that can be used to define how Neovim starts up. These options can be used to define the initial buffer content, which configuration file to load, and many others.
To start vim with an empty buffer, simply type:
nvim
To open an existing file in Vim, simply add the path to the file:
nvim [path/to/file]
You can also include multiple files, to open them all at once:
nvim [path/to/file/one] [path/to/file/two] ...
Neovim also supports "globbing", which allows you to open multiple files by specifying a simple pattern. For example, to open all python files located in the current directory, simply type:
nvim *.py
In additional to opening files, Neovim supports a variety of options to control how it starts and which features are enabled. While these may not be used on a daily basis, it is good to know that they exist and how to find them.
List some of the common options from the terminal with the command:
nvim --help
or visit the Neovim docs for the complete list.
To start with options, specify one or more options when the nvim command is invoked. For example,
use the -R option to open a file in read-only mode:
nvim -R [path/to/tile]
Finally, as a terminal program Neovim can be called from command-line scripts to implement some types of powerful workflows. For example, suppose you want to edit the current directory listing you could execute:
ls -a | vim -
this command lists the current directory (ls -a), then pipes (|) the result to Vim which is
listening on stdin (-). While this example is a bit contrived, this demonstrates a simple way to
leverage a wide range of command-line tools to get content into Vim.