plenary.nvim VS nvim-lua-guide

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

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.