zen-mode.nvim VS nvim-lua-guide

I use this sometimes and it's pretty nice: https://github.com/folke/zen-mode.nvim

This is super cool, I've been using https://github.com/folke/zen-mode.nvim for some time but what caught my attention were the side buffers for notes. I took a look at your configuration options and was wondering if you had thought about configuring the width by a fraction of the total view width?

I went from https://github.com/junegunn/goyo.vim to https://github.com/folke/zen-mode.nvim and now this

You could define yourself a variable whenever :ZenMode is toggled and check for said variable (or have a look here if anything is returned by the function is_open()).

Exactly right! I use Arch Linux with i3. My terminal emulators are alacritty and cool-retro-term, depending on the mood. For writing I use neovim with the zen-mode plugin.

However, I want to style this a bit more maybe have a better-looking tree on startup. One of the solutions I could think of is to open the nvim-tree in zen-mode. This ends up looking like this.

folke/zen-mode.nvim - Distraction-free mode

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.