binwheels-neovim

An unofficial Python package to enable pre-built, cross-platform Neovim installation via standard Python package installation.

Usage

Using uv or pipx:

# uv
uv tool install binwheels-neovim

# pipx
pipx install binwheels-neovim

After installation, the nvim command will be available in your PATH:

nvim myfile.txt

How does it work?

Python wheels adhere to a naming scheme to indicate platform compatibility. The code in this repository is responsible for downloading (Windows/macOS) or compiling (Linux) an official Neovim release and packaging it into a binwheels-neovim wheel with the same version as the Neovim release it includes, and with platform/architecture tags that match the version of Neovim we have downloaded/compiled. For widest Python interpreter compatibility possible, the py3-none tag is used.

During installation, the contents of a Python wheel are unzipped to the site-packages/ directory in whatever Python environment the wheel is being installed into. This is where the Neovim application files end up: a binwheels_neovim/ directory inside site-packages/. But this doesn't help us, because that location is not on the user's $PATH.

To make nvim accessible on the user's $PATH we will leverage the executable scripts functionality of a Python wheel. This functionality allows you to specify a function in your package that will be installed as an executable command in the user's environment. If your environment is a local .venv/ directory, for example, the script would be installed to .venv/bin/. When using uv tool install or pipx install, the executable is added to a location on the user's $PATH.

Putting it all together: In order to make the nvim binary from this package available on the user's path, we need a Python function that will launch the nvim binary in a cross-platform way, and we need that function to itself be installed as an executable command named nvim. That is accomplished by the following:

1. A file at neovim_pyinstaller/main.py, which contains a launch_neovim() function that launches the nvim binary.
2. The following entry in pyproject.toml, which ensures launch_neovim() is installed as an executable command named nvim:

[project.scripts]
nvim = "binwheels_neovim.main:launch_neovim"

Platform Support

Currently

• Linux (x64)
• macOS (x64, arm64)
• Windows (x64)

Maybe one day

• Linux (arm64)

License

This package is licensed under Apache-2.0. Neovim itself is licensed under Apache-2.0 and Vim license.