Help wanted in building a vim plugin (`vim-iced`)

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1

Hi all. I built a nix package for a vim-plugin vim-iced (GitHub - liquidz/vim-iced: Clojure Interactive Development Environment for Vim8/Neovim), using pkgs.vimUtils.buildVimPlugin. The derivation follows:

let
  vim-iced = self.vimUtils.buildVimPlugin {
    name = "vim-iced";
    src = self.fetchFromGitHub {
      owner = "liquidz";
      repo = "vim-iced";
      rev = "3.6.2";
      sha256 = "1klvq511zc1y8rbjizhc3m0hx3a0ydcjv7wz1s74jx8vnfw24w5n";
    };
  };
in
  {
    neovim = super.neovim.override {
      configure = {
        packages.myVimPackage = with pkgs.vimPlugins; {
          start = [ vim-iced fzf-vim];
        };
      };
    };
  }

The basic features of the plugin work as intended. As an extra feature, this plug-in also provides an iced binary. Reference from vim-iced

2.1.2. iced command

iced is a utility command to make you easy to use vim-iced, and it comes with vim-iced. Setup is easy, just add the bin directory under the installed vim-iced directory to $PATH environmental variable. With above vim-plug setting, ~/.vim/plugged/vim-iced/bin is the directory to add to $PATH.

# For bash or zsh
$ export PATH=$PATH:~/.vim/plugged/vim-iced/bin

My derivation does not expose that automatically. The installed derivation does provide the binary in a working condition:

>> find /nix/store -name 'vim-iced'
/nix/store/<hash>-vim-pack-dir/pack/myVimPackage/start/vim-iced

>>

>> ls -l /nix/store/<hash>-vim-pack-dir/pack/myVimPackage/start/vim-iced/bin/
total 20
-r-xr-xr-x 1 jayesh admin 14511 Jan  1  1970 iced
-r--r--r-- 1 jayesh admin    64 Jan  1  1970 iced.cmd

>>

>> /nix/store/<hash>-vim-pack-dir/pack/myVimPackage/start/vim-iced/bin/iced version
3.6.2

Can anyone guide me how I can expose this iced binary to the shell?

1 Like
2

I managed to solve this by building another derivation on top of vim-iced plugin derivation:

{ vim-iced, stdenv }:

# adapted from: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/8b2e7324dc19b892bf3785d11fea338cfb4d1426/pkgs/applications/editors/vim/vimacs.nix
# Like vim-iced, vimacs plugin also provides a binary (bin/vim) which needs to be exposed to $PATH explicitly.

# In Nix, ~/.nix-profile/bin (which itself is a symlink that points to the current Nix profile) is exposed to $PATH, and all the binaries in the `bin` dir of the installed derivations of the current profile are symlinked inside ~/.nix-profile/bin.
# The problem is a derivation's `bin` is symlinked to ~/.nix-profile only if the derivation is installed directly (and not indirectly like vim-iced, which is handled by neovim).

# The solution for vimacs is to have two derivations:
# vimPlugins.vimacs, which acts as the actual vim plugin, and
# vimacs, which links to the content of `vimPlugins.vimacs` so as not to duplicate them, and then exposes `vimacs` binary within to $PATH.

# This derivation follows the same approach: expose the `iced` binary from the `vim-iced` plugin derivation by symlinking to the full contentof `vim-iced`. Symlinking to just `bin/iced` raises errors while invoking `iced repl`. So better safe than sorry.

stdenv.mkDerivation rec {
  pname = "iced-repl";
  version = vim-iced.version;
  buildInputs = [ vim-iced ];
  buildCommand = ''
    ln -s "${vim-iced}"/share/vim-plugins/vim-iced $out
  '';
}

Relevant files:

I am not sure if this is the correct approach, but it works for me for now.

1 Like
3

Scratch the last comment completely (I cannot edit it anymore).

A much simpler solution is to install vim-iced BOTH as a:

  • vimPlugin, in order to use the plugin features from vim
  • standalone package, so that Nix symlinks the bin/iced binary to ~/.nix-profile/bin without extra efforts on our part. This redundant installation does not affect the functions of the vimPlugin installation.
4

Isn’t the “bin” directory too deep in the path for nix to add it to the PATH? I think nix only adds bin directories immediately after the output path (like /nix/store/6n1shhsf3ryn7sm81ih11gfrrsq0hx41-vimplugin-vim-iced/bin, as opposed to /nix/store/6n1shhsf3ryn7sm81ih11gfrrsq0hx41-vimplugin-vim-iced/share/vim-plugins/vim-iced/bin).

I tried adding it as a system package but iced command still couldn’t be found.

5 
jayesh | ~/nix-config  
=> iced
-bash: /Users/jayesh/.nix-profile/bin/iced: No such file or directory

jayesh | ~/nix-config  
=> nix-env -iA nixpkgs.vim-iced
installing 'vimplugin-vim-iced-3.6.2'

jayesh | ~/nix-config  
=> nix-env -q
my-env
nix-2.4pre20210908_3c56f62
vimplugin-vim-iced-3.6.2

jayesh | ~/nix-config  
=> iced version
3.6.2

jayesh | ~/nix-config  
=> which iced
/Users/jayesh/.nix-profile/bin/iced

jayesh | ~/nix-config  
=> nix-env -e vimplugin-vim-iced 
uninstalling 'vimplugin-vim-iced-3.6.2'

jayesh | ~/nix-config  
=> iced
-bash: /Users/jayesh/.nix-profile/bin/iced: No such file or directory

Installing it as a standalone package works here.

GitHub - liquidz/vim-iced: Clojure Interactive Development Environment for Vim8/Neovim lists bin at its root. So nix would also put bin at root of the derivation IF vim-iced is installed as a standalone package.

1 Like