How to use local plugin as source?

[diego-velez]

Contributing guidelines

• I have read CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md

Module(s)

mini.deps

Question

Hello, I recently switched from lazy.nvim to mini.deps, and I'm loving it. Thank you for your contribution to the ecosystem.

I'm wondering how I could use a local plugin that I have on a completely different directory. See sometimes I want to contribute to a plugin or make my own, and with lazy I could change the source in the plugin spec and use Neovim like that.

So for example, if I wanted to contribute to mini.nvim, I would clone mini.nvim, then change my plugin spec from 'echasnovski/mini.nvim' to ~/nvim_repos/mini.nvim and that would work. How can I achieve this with mini.deps? and how can I do it for mini.nvim too?

[echasnovski]

Hi! Thanks for kind words!

The workflow you describe was discussed in #1326 and is not really 100% possible. My suggestion would be:

• Install it as a regular plugin with add() but under a different name. So add({ source = 'diego-velez/mini.nvim', name = 'my-mini', checkout = 'HEAD' }) (while disabling "regular" adding of 'mini.nvim'). Then perform changes directly inside '~/.local/share/nvim/site/pack/deps/opt/my-mini'.
• If there is local plugin for development, my suggestion would be to directly put it inside different package. For example '~/.local/share/nvim/site/pack/develop/opt/my-plugin' (requires a dedicated vim.cmd.packadd('my-plugin')). If you really need it to be located in '~/nvim_repos/my-plugin', you can try symlinking.

I do understand that support of such use case in 'mini.nvim' is probably lacking (although I've never had issues of putting my local plugins directly inside packages), so there is a plan to improve this in vim.pack (built-in plugin manager in Neovim>=0.12 that is basically an improved version of 'mini.deps').