EditorConfig in NeoVIM

I’m currently playing a little bit around with NeoVIM - not as a replacement for Emacs but simply for some situations where I just need to open a file in a shell, change a word and be done with it again. I’ve used VIM for that before but I’ve heard great things about NeoVIM recently and so I thought I should give it a try.

Anyway… whatever editor I use, it has to support .editorconfig files. No excuses. I work on to tons of different projects with a lot of different coding styles and EditorConfig is the one thing that helps keeping me sane when jumping from 2- to 4-space indentations all day long.

For VIM there exists an official plugin that’s also supposed to work on NeoVIM, so I’ve added it to my init.vim:

Plug 'editorconfig/editorconfig-vim'

Turns out, there might be some compatibility issues between that plugin, my globally installed Python, NeoVIM, and probably half a dozen other components:

function 37_InitializePythonBuiltin[23]..provider#python#Call[9]..remote#host#Require[13]..provider#pythonx#Require, line 15 Vim(if):Channel was closed by the client Failed to load python host. You can try to see what happened by starting Neovim with the environment variable $NVIM_PYTHON_LOG_FILE set to a file and opening the generated log file. Also, the host stderr will be available in Neovim log, so it may contain useful information. See also ~/.nvimlog. Press ENTER or type command to continue

Googling for solutions here only turned up some Python-setup related things that I actually didn’t want to get into.

Luckily, the plugin also supports a globally installed C-version of EditorConfig which is what I wanted to use anyway. All you have to do is tell editorconfig-vim about it:

let g:EditorConfig_exec_path = '/usr/local/bin/editorconfig'
let g:EditorConfig_core_mode = 'external_command'

That’s it. After a restart nvim finally starts without the warning above and also recognises my .editorconfig files out of the box 😊