nix-dotfiles VS nvim-lua-guide

You can check mine out. There are also some here

You can also try my full config: https://github.com/mjlbach/nix-dotfiles/blob/master/nixpkgs/configs/neovim/init.lua

I do, in fact, use expandtab

Here's my init.lua. Neovim nightly will read this by default if you place it at $HOME/.local/share/nvim/init.lua. I use this configuration on the neovim source (c/lua) with clangd and sumneko language server, and on projects for research (python mostly), amongst other things.

Not yet! w is window and o is options. You can check out my init.lua for most of the common ones.

For autocompletion, I recommend completion.nvim. Here is the pertinent part of my init.lua (uncomment require'completion'.on_attach()), but you can wrap this in a lua heredoc if you're still using an init.vim.

Which server? Here is a minimal init.lua and my personal init.lua

You're not actually using any of those channels. You need to overlay the channels onto your package set. If you hop on the IRC or discord we can work through your specific error message, but here is how I have it configured (with home-manager):

https://github.com/mjlbach/nix-dotfiles/blob/5f956f9548bdf7f9c954c926e6ab24e94c4bf55d/nixpkgs/configs/neovim/init.lua#L380-L425

Nvim Lua guide

My main struggles beyond a simple problem are just the inability to find a way to easily debug things and the general process for setting up a plugin. I mostly work with Python/Jupyter, some C and Lua/Bash scripts, and usually you can either write tests/print debug for smaller scale things or get some stack trace if you have an error. With Neovim development, it just feels like there's nothing more besides update plugin, try on neovim, fail, bash head against wall, and repeat, and that doesn't quite seem efficient or correct - I'm sure there's something out there that should make the process easier. I tried looking online but I haven't found many that really fit my needs (most of the resources here seem more targeted towards creating your own init.lua, and Luadev plugin's commands are all broken (:Luadev-RunLine and any other command keeps telling me I got some trailing space). I'm really just looking to see how to make a snippet library, but there doesn't seem to be much that helps me. If someone could let me know how they debug their plugin or point me to any external resources, please let me know!

I have no guidance for the first point. For the second, checkout the neovim lua guide or : lua-guide

A quick google search turned up this codeacademy class on learning to program in Javascript. I didn't vet the whole thing, but it appears to assume you know nothing, which is what you need. If you go through that, you can then consume one of the resources that /u/luascriptdev post to equate that back to Lua. Again, the concepts translate.