Introduction

nxvim is a modal, vim-style editor written in Rust. It is a headless, asynchronous editor server with thin UI clients (a terminal client, a native GPU GUI, and a client-side WebAssembly build) talking over msgpack-RPC. The editor logic lives in one place; every front end shares identical editing behavior.

It speaks vim at the keyboard — keystrokes, modes, ex-commands, and options track vim/neovim’s observable editing behavior — but every API is nxvim’s own. Configuration and plugins target the nx.* Lua namespace, where the server owns every UI surface and plugins provide data and behavior. There are a few vim.* aliases over the native nx.* API for convenience.

How to read this book

• Getting started — install or build nxvim and run it.
• Configuration — point nxvim at your init.lua and set options through nx.*.
• Plugin Development — the anatomy of an nxvim plugin and a worked example.
• nx.* API Reference — the public Lua API, generated directly from the prelude source so it always matches the running editor.
• Architecture — the crate layout, client-server model, RPC and View protocols, the rope text model, and the Lua bridge.

This book is itself generated from the repository: the narrative chapters and the long-form architecture and plugin-authoring docs come from docs/, and the API reference is extracted from crates/nxvim-lua/src/prelude/.