nvim-lspconfig VS mason.nvim

Compare nvim-lspconfig vs mason.nvim and see what are their differences.

mason.nvim

Portable package manager for Neovim that runs everywhere Neovim runs. Easily install and manage LSP servers, DAP servers, linters, and formatters. (by williamboman)
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nvim-lspconfig mason.nvim
523 108
9,481 6,777
4.0% -
9.7 8.2
6 days ago 9 days ago
Lua Lua
Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

nvim-lspconfig

Posts with mentions or reviews of nvim-lspconfig. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-03.
  • JetBrains' unremovable AI assistant meets irresistible outcry
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Feb 2024
    I suggest looking for blog posts about this, you're gunnuh wanna pick out a plugin manager and stuff. It's kind of like a package manager for neovim. You can install everything manually but usually you manually install a plugin manager and it gives you commands to manage the rest of your plugins.

    These two plugins are the bare minimum in my view.

    https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter

    Treesitter gives you much better syntax highlighting based on a parser for a given language.

    https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig

    This plugin helps you connect to a given language LSP quickly with sensible defaults. You more or less pick your language from here and copy paste a snippet, and then install the relevant LSP:

    https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig/blob/master/doc/ser...

    For Python you'll want pylsp. For JavaScript it will depend on what frontend framework you're using, I probably can't help you there.

    pylsp itself takes some plugins and you'll probably want them. https://github.com/python-lsp/python-lsp-server

    Best of luck! Happy hacking.

  • Neovide – a simple, no-nonsense, cross-platform GUI for Neovim
    17 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Jan 2024
    Adding language support it neovim isn't very difficult once you're setup. I use nvim-lspconfig[1] and just about any language you could need is documented[2]. But like others have mentioned there are batteries included distributions of neovim if that's your cup of tea.

    [1]: https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig/

    [2]: https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig/blob/master/doc/ser...

  • A guide on Neovim's LSP client
    7 projects | dev.to | 13 Jan 2024
    If we can't find the basic usage in the documentation we can go to nvim-lspconfig's github repository. In there we look for a folder called server_configurations, this contains configuration files for a bunch of language servers.
  • Do I need NeoVIM?
    11 projects | /r/neovim | 7 Dec 2023
    https://github.com/hrsh7th/nvim-cmp This is an autocompletion engine https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter This allows NeoVim to install parsing scripts so NeoVim can do things like code highlighting. https://github.com/williamboman/mason.nvim Not strictly necessary, but allows you to access a repo of LSP, install them, and configure them for without you actively messing about in config files. https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig Also not strictly necessary, but vastly simplifies LSP setup. https://github.com/williamboman/mason-lspconfig.nvim This lets the above two plugins talk to each other more easily.
  • cpp setting problem
    4 projects | /r/neovim | 6 Dec 2023
    This specific issue talks about fixing clangd for that error: https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig/issues/2184. The issue is ongoing for ccls AFAIK but for clangd, this has been discussed and fixed in the past already.
  • Need help to set up the pbkit language server
    2 projects | /r/neovim | 21 Sep 2023
    I am trying to set up the pbkit language server for protobuf files. Since it is not part of the nvim-lspconfig repo's server configurations, I have to figure the way out myself. It doesn't seem to be too difficult, as I can start from the bufls configuration there. The following is what I have at the moment:
  • Option omnifunc is not set
    1 project | /r/neovim | 31 Aug 2023
    I have configured neovim with lspconfig and mason. Added the suggested configuration of the lsp config(https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig) to ~/.config/nvim/after/plugin/lsp.lua Then I installed via mason the following language servers:
  • Using nvim-lint as a null-ls alternative for linters
    4 projects | /r/neovim | 14 Aug 2023
    Personally, i think nvim-lint is the best alternative currently, specially so because it has no dependencies on external binaries. This guide assumes you already have your LSP set up with nvim-lspconfig (or an alternative like lsp-zero). You should also have an way to install the linters you are gonna need, i highly recommend Mason with mason-lspconfig.
  • The Future of the Vim Project
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Aug 2023
    Basically neovim can act as a client to a variety of different language servers (https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig/blob/master/doc/ser...) which give neovim IDE capabilities. This can be done in original Vim also but requires external plugins which can be a pain to compile and install. Neovim has it built in.
  • SQL LSP dialect
    2 projects | /r/neovim | 4 Aug 2023
    I'm struggling to get [sqlls](https://github.com/joe-re/sql-language-server) with [nvim-lspconfig](https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig) to use Postgres syntax.

mason.nvim

Posts with mentions or reviews of mason.nvim. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-21.
  • I can't stand using VSCode so I wrote my own (it wasn't easy)
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Apr 2024
  • Using a venv with Neovim's Python LSP
    2 projects | dev.to | 5 Apr 2024
    I recently started coding with Neovim using kickstart.nvim as the template for my editor configuration. I downloaded the python-lsp-server package using Mason, but I was disappointed to discover that the IntelliSense on my third party dependencies didn't work. The LSP was resolving to my global Python installation, which did not have the packages from my virtual environment (venv) installed.
  • Do I need NeoVIM?
    11 projects | /r/neovim | 7 Dec 2023
    https://github.com/hrsh7th/nvim-cmp This is an autocompletion engine https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter This allows NeoVim to install parsing scripts so NeoVim can do things like code highlighting. https://github.com/williamboman/mason.nvim Not strictly necessary, but allows you to access a repo of LSP, install them, and configure them for without you actively messing about in config files. https://github.com/neovim/nvim-lspconfig Also not strictly necessary, but vastly simplifies LSP setup. https://github.com/williamboman/mason-lspconfig.nvim This lets the above two plugins talk to each other more easily.
  • Do I need a plugin manager ?
    3 projects | /r/neovim | 7 Dec 2023
    I'm using mason.nvim to install my dependencies, I've this snippet at nvim/plugin/mason.lua so after cloning my dotfiles I can just run:
  • Mason can't install gopls (or gofumpt, or goimports)
    2 projects | /r/neovim | 6 Dec 2023
    The suggestion from this thread fixed it for me. I just needed to unset GOOS and GOARCH then restart neovim.
  • Neovim documentation is pretty bad
    1 project | /r/neovim | 18 Jul 2023
    For instance, I'm trying to install rust-analyzer in lazyvim from https://github.com/williamboman/mason.nvim. The installation instructions are:
  • LazyVim
    32 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Jul 2023
  • How do you enable semantic highlighting for Python?
    4 projects | /r/neovim | 7 Jul 2023
    I have pyright installed via mason which apparently support "semantic token highlighting" but have been having a hard time getting these colors to show up in a buffer. It seems Neovim has changed how it handles semantic highlighting a few times so there's still some conflicting information online. It's hard to know what's current and what's not. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
  • language server not installed or missing from path
    1 project | /r/neovim | 5 Jul 2023
    Use mason to install the language servers you want.
  • Why is nobody using CoC anymore?
    3 projects | /r/neovim | 3 Jul 2023
    Because null-ls.nvim & mason.nvim together do everything I wanted CoC for

What are some alternatives?

When comparing nvim-lspconfig and mason.nvim you can also consider the following projects:

coc.nvim - Nodejs extension host for vim & neovim, load extensions like VSCode and host language servers.

lazy-lsp.nvim - Neovim plugin to auto install LSP servers

null-ls.nvim - Use Neovim as a language server to inject LSP diagnostics, code actions, and more via Lua.

nvim-lsp-installer - Further development has moved to https://github.com/williamboman/mason.nvim!

nvim-jdtls - Extensions for the built-in LSP support in Neovim for eclipse.jdt.ls

omnisharp-vim - Vim omnicompletion (intellisense) and more for C#

coc - Chroniques Oubliées Contemporain

formatter.nvim

ale - Check syntax in Vim/Neovim asynchronously and fix files, with Language Server Protocol (LSP) support

neoformat - :sparkles: A (Neo)vim plugin for formatting code.