batteries VS plenary.nvim

Lua is a small language and its "standard library" is very minimal. Lua's intended for embedding so usually the host program provides a broader standard library by exposing functions to lua. However, there are several standard library packages for lua: batteries and lume are focused on gamedev; Penlight aims at bringing the breadth of python's stdlib to lua; plenary.nvim for nvim plugins; and probably more for other domains. I'd definitely recommend checking these out to help get closer to functionality level of most other languages (I use both lume and batteries, but dropped penlight awhile back because I found some implementations confusing/overcomplicated/inconsistent).

Some are featureful like batteries, some are minimal like hump.

Making a lua-based distro might benefit from packing in an existing lua utility library instead of starting your own: lume (useful single file of utilities) or batteries (organized into modules).

Lua is a small language and its "standard library" is very minimal. This was one of my initial roadblocks. Lua's intended for embedding so usually the host program provides a broader standard library by exposing functions to lua. However, there are several standard library packages for lua: batteries, Penlight, or the aforementioned lume. I'd definitely recommend checking these out to help get closer to functionality level of most other languages (I use both lume and batteries, but dropped penlight awhile back).

we can create a function to open a pop up menu using plenary.popup like this, you need to install neovim plenary if you don't already have it https://github.com/nvim-lua/plenary.nvim

If you are really interested in doing this yourself with loop, you should take a look at either plenary.job or netman.shell (I made the latter) as both are very well documented.

I feel this :( That said, alot of plugins rely on plenary.nvim. Its up to you if you determine this is "non-essential" or not. It will almost certainly be available for you to use already.

The big reason I ask is that reaching out to an external python shell to run commands (disregard the fact that its python running) is going to be much slower than using the in built lua JIT interpreter. Additionally, plenary has a built in curl function so you don't have to "reinvent the wheel".

There is also test harness in nvim-lua/plenary.nvim with a slightly different design, but still usable of course.

I am simply using busted or more specifically vusted which is a wrapper around busted for Neovim. It should be quite straightforward to learn the basics, I would say you mostly need to know these functions: describe, it (these are used to structure your test cases) and assert.are_same (to check for table equality). Some people are also using plenary which is also based on busted.

It's based on nvim-lua-plugin-template, but uses Nix flakes to run plenary.nvim tests.

Plenary plugin for Nvim