Moving from Packer to Lazy.nvim

Previously I mentioned that I use NeoVim as my editor of choice and updated to using Packer as a plugin manager. At the end of January 2025 I decided to finally migrate away from the unmaintained Packer project to Lazy.nvim.

This migration went much smoother than I anticipated. I won’t go as heavy into the details as I did in my previous post on moving from vim-plug to Packer, but sufficed to say moving from one Lua based package manager to another is much simpler than migrating from Vimscript to Lua. I mostly followed the information from Lazy.nvim’s documentation site and also peeked at LazyVim configurations for some inspiration.

The only big change was going from lsp-zero.nvim to managing my own LSP plugins. Thankfully, the folks responsible for lsp-zero.nvim opted to alter their documentation to covering this very issue.

Other smaller changes included moving a lot of my configuration from Lua files in after/plugin/ into the same place their lazy loading was defined. Although, some still remain, I’ve done this with a great deal of my plugin configuration which has kept definitions and configuration together.

I initially had an issue with autocompletion being duplicated. This turned out to be a user error on my part as I had installed 2 competing autocompletion engines. I also had some troubled getting snippets to show up in my autocompletion, which again was simply a misconfiguration on my part.

After getting my main plugins working, I opted to slowly alter plugins to lazily load when possible. Unlike others, I am not obsessive over millisecond benchmarks when it comes to opening my editor, but delaying some of the more resource hungry plugins from starting when not needed is always good practice.

The actual process to get back to a state similar to what my Packer based configuration had given me took less than a day.