# Neovim + Kickstart? without Flakes or Home Manager

**URL:** https://discourse.nixos.org/t/neovim-kickstart-without-flakes-or-home-manager/64327
**Category:** Uncategorized
**Created:** [May 15, 2025, 11:02pm UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/neovim-kickstart-without-flakes-or-home-manager/64327 "2025-05-15T23:02:54Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 2

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### Author: ![bew](https://discourse.nixos.org/user_avatar/discourse.nixos.org/bew/32/2091_2.png) [@bew](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/bew)
#### Post date: [May 16, 2025, 12:12am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/neovim-kickstart-without-flakes-or-home-manager/64327/2 "2025-05-16T00:12:44Z")

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Not a direct answer to your question, but this made me think of this post:

> **[Flakes aren't real and cannot hurt you: a guide to using Nix flakes the...](https://jade.fyi/blog/flakes-arent-real/)**
>
> computers i guess

* * *

### Back to topic:

Would something like this help you?  
This is a simple nvim config built using [`nixvim`](https://github.com/nix-community/nixvim) (which I actually never used ^^ but it’s good for minimal setups)

Put the following in `somefile.nix`:

```nix
let
  # The following get's a nixpkgs & nixvim version, included as is to make this example simple & self-contained.
  # In reality you should use a pinning helper like npins (https://github.com/andir/npins).
  nixpkgs = import (builtins.fetchTarball {
    url = "https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/archive/nixos-24.11.tar.gz";
    sha256 = "sha256:1cvxfj03xhakyrrz8bh4499vz5d35ay92575irrbmydcxixsrf3w";
  }) {};
  nixvim = nixpkgs.fetchFromGitHub {
    owner = "nix-community";
    repo = "nixvim";
    rev = "nixos-24.11"; # must be compatible with nixpkgs
    hash = "sha256-MpLljx/1dGnBIQlUswaUz/ZeOp44R3ngc1iBf4tyzyc=";
  };

  makeNixvim = (import nixvim).outputs.legacyPackages.${builtins.currentSystem}.makeNixvim;
  nvim = makeNixvim {
    colorschemes.gruvbox.enable = true;
  };
in {
  inherit nvim;
}

```

And run it with `nix run -f somefile.nix nvim`

Note that in this case the parameter named `nvim` is important for `nix run ..` to use the correct `nvim` binary from the built derivation in `nvim` attribute.

Alternatively you can put that `nvim` ‘variable’ in your `NixOS`’s `environment.systemPackages` (it’s a full nvim packages with a `nvim` bin)

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_[View the full topic](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/neovim-kickstart-without-flakes-or-home-manager/64327)._