Question: How to use lze to load the snacks.nvim?

[JackTheMico]

Hi there, first of all, thank you for creating nixCats and lze.

I'm trying to move from LazyVim to nixCats because I just found how amazing the Nix and NixOS are.
But I'm struggling in loading snacks.nvim with lze, I couldn't make it load anyway.
Here's my config repo: https://github.com/JackTheMico/jackwy-nixCats

Can you please show me what I was missing or how should I do?

[BirdeeHub]

Snacks is hard to lazy load. Been trying to figure that out myself.

The issue is that if you are using bigfile or quickfile snacks it needs to be loaded at startup

But Id really like to be able to run some of the other ones on a lazy load trigger.

If you were to use lazy.nvim snacks still would not load lazily, because bigfile would need to be required at startup and this would cause lazy.nvim to load it immediately regardless of what you do. So you can either use bigfile/quickfile OR lazy load it in lazy.nvim, not both...

In short, I think its a plugin design issue with snacks and it cant exactly be lazy loaded, but you can come close sorta, Ill do my best to explain below. Im not sure its worth it, it might still be better to do it at startup, but I still have some tips in the first section below that apply there too.

---

I cannot figure out how to use bigfile or quickfile without loading it at startup

If you dont use bigfile or quickfile you should be able to load it lazily with no issues on whatever trigger you want, probably DeferredUIEnter for like, indent, but maybe keys or whatever if you only use gitbrowse and terminal or whatever

---

The closest I have found to lazy loading is this. First, put it in startupPlugins

Then, at the start of your config you can require bigfile or quickfiledirectly without loading anything else

require('snacks').bigfile.setup()

^careful, I typod it the first time, require('snacks.bigfile').setup() throws. The above doesnt.

Then you can make a lze spec that runs the setup function on whatever other triggers you want

require('lze').load {
  "snacks.nvim",
  keys = {
    { '<c-\\>', function() Snacks.terminal() end, mode = { 'n' }, desc = 'open snacks terminal' },
  },
  after = function(_)
    require('snacks').setup({
      terminal = { enabled = true, },
    })
  end,
}

since its lua, even if you put it in startupPlugins, this is still at least lazy loading the heavy parts as the things that aren't required arent used until they are called.

But so far, this is the best solution I have found.

---

The above is actually not possible in lazy.nvim.

You cant "load it at startup" outside of a spec in lazy.nvim and then still run a spec later on the rest of it. lazy.nvim users basically only have 1 option, lazy = false. Because of the auto require in lazy.nvim, if they try to make it lazy and then require 'snacks.bigfile' separately as we have done, it would run the whole spec, thus not being any different than lazy = false.

We can hack around it a bit in lze by putting it in startupPlugns (pack/*/start) and still sorta lazy load the parts we don't need at startup at least.

But yeah the design is not at all ideal.

[BirdeeHub]

heres what I have rn

Still evaluating it. Havent tried all of them yet.

I cant seem to get the notify or notifier to work regardless of if I lazy load it or not, but Im sure its user error on my part. It probably should go up with bigfile at startup too... But it wasnt working even when I was using snacks on its own without an lze spec. Again, probably user error.

Honesty I might go back to loading it at startup without a spec for simplicity because im not sure how much this is actually saving me overall.

So Im not 100% sure I recommend doing this?

-- NOTE: this plugin is "loaded" at startup,
-- but we delay the main setup call until later.
-- also we still need to require bigfile from the main one
-- because it tries to index the Snacks global unsafely...

-- also be quiet I dont care
---@diagnostic disable-next-line: invisible
require('snacks').bigfile.setup()

return {
  {
    "snacks.nvim",
    keys = {
      {'<c-\\>', function() Snacks.terminal() end, mode = {'n'}, desc = 'open snacks terminal' },
      {"<leader>_", function() Snacks.lazygit.open() end, mode = {"n"}, desc = 'LazyGit' },
      {"<leader>gc", function() Snacks.lazygit.log() end, mode = {"n"}, desc = 'Lazy[G]it [C]ommit log' },
      {"<leader>gl", function() Snacks.gitbrowse.open() end, mode = {"n"}, desc = '[G]oto git [L]ink' },
    },
    event = { 'DeferredUIEnter' },
    after = function(_)
      -- when you do { enabled = false }
      require('snacks').setup({
        -- quickfile = { enabled = true, },
        -- bigfile = { enabled = true, },

        gitbrowse = { enabled = true, },
        lazygit = { enabled = true, },
        git = { enabled = true, },
        terminal = { enabled = true, },
        scope = { enabled = true, },
        indent = {
          enabled = true,
          scope = {
          },
          chunk = {
            -- enabled = true,
          }
        },
        statuscolumn = {
          left = { "mark", "git" }, -- priority of signs on the left (high to low)
          right = { "sign", "fold" }, -- priority of signs on the right (high to low)
          folds = {
            open = false, -- show open fold icons
            git_hl = false, -- use Git Signs hl for fold icons
          },
          git = {
            -- patterns to match Git signs
            patterns = { "GitSign", "MiniDiffSign" },
          },
          refresh = 50, -- refresh at most every 50ms
        },
      })
    end,
  }
}

[JackTheMico]

Your answer is great , thank you for your helping! ☺️

[BirdeeHub]

not sure which for ruff i dont do a ton of python

[JackTheMico]

Thank you for the follow-up 😃. Both NixOS and nixCats are rabbit holes to me 😂, I'll spend lots of time to complete my setup gradually.
I'll try to find out what the most I can leverage from snacks. Thanks again for your help, your answer really helps me a lot.

BTW, have you ever considered creating a awesome-nixCats repo to collect people's well-configured nixCats configurations?
I think that could be a related repo to offer better understandings to people who might interest in nixCats.

[BirdeeHub]

thats not the worst idea I have ever heard?

I do have 3 in the templates, I kinda didnt want to put anyone in the spotlight. chrisrb has a good one, I havent looked at a ton of them, I peek occasionally and offer pointers but thats about it

I was kinda hoping that people could share them in discussions? Maybe I can make a "share your config here" megathread thing on it.

[bbaserdem]

I had the same thoughts with snacks. Is it only the bigfile plugin that needs to be loaded on startup? That's awesome news to me; the workaround seems very easy to manage

I'm happy to share my nixcats config after I'm done since I'm keeping it with non-nix support as well.

[BirdeeHub]

bigfile, quickfile, notifier, idk a few others maybe.

It honestly probably isnt necessarily faster to lazy load it like this. But outside of that hes done a reasonable job of making sure it mostly lazy loads itself?

It is what it is really.