04. Telescope

Telescope is, created by one of the main members of the Neovim team - TJ Devries .
Side note, TJ posts a lot of Neovim related content on his YouTube channel and on his Twitch streams. In particular, his channel YouTube has been a great resource. Check it out!
Telescope is an essential plugin in my opinion. It's a fuzzy search engine built into Lua that can be configured in all sorts of ways. It adds a lot of functionality to your Neovim setup. I haven't realized its true potential yet, but it's awesome for file search and text search.

I have tested this on both Linux and macOS, but it should work on Windows as well.

Let's install it (we'll put all the commands in your terminal):
Paste this code into your init file.

call plug#begin(has('nvim') ? stdpath('data') . '/plugged' : '~/.vim/plugged'))

" Telescope install Neovim
" Planery"
Plug 'nvim-lua/plenary.nvim'
" Telescope plugin
Plug 'nvim-telescope/telescope.nvim'
" Fuzzy Telescope fzf
Plugin 'nvim-telescope/telescope-fzf-native.nvim', { 'do': 'make' }

call plug#end()

Note that we are installing more than one plugin here. Telescope requires another plugin called Planery. And another plugin is Telescope Sorter, which supports fzf and Telescope syntax.
To complete the installation, be sure to follow these three steps:
Save init.vim :w
Restore the source of init.vims :so % or restart Neovim
Install the plugin using :PlugInstall.
Next we need to configure Telescope. This is a common practice among Vim plugins. Telescope is a Lua based plugin.
First we need to create a new lua folder in the directory: nvim ~/.config/nvim/lua.

cd ~/.config/nvim
mkdir lua

Inside the lua directory, we will create a subdirectory for the namespace of our plugin configurations. To understand why this is necessary, we need to explain how Vim handles file lookups. In short, creating a namespace subdirectory inside the lua directory prevents unwanted file collisions .

I decided to use my GitHub nick as the name of my subdirectory:

cd ~/.config/nvim/lua
mkdir kankys

It doesn't matter what you name the directory. Once you create it, you'll want to move to it using cd:

cd ~/.config/nvim/lua/your-directory-name

Note: your-directory-name is used as a placeholder. Replace it with the name of your directory you want.
In the namespace directory, create a plugin-name.lua file for each plugin you want/need to configure. You create Telescope like this (we are persistent in cd ~/.config/nvim/lua/your-directory-name ):

nvim telescope.lua

A useful Vim tip is that you can open files before they exist. If you close a file without saving it, it won't be created! In the example above, we open telescope.luav in Neovim. If we save the file, it will be created.
Our configuration for Telescope will be:

local telescope = require('telescope')
telescope.setup {}
telescope.load_extension('fzf')

Paste this code into telescope.lua and save. Everything we need is in the telescope.lua file.
The above example gives us a first taste of Lua. I've found that a lot of plugins need at least this setup in lua:

require('PLUGIN_NAME').setup {}

I won't dive deep into the Telescope configuration in this post. If you want to see some of the available setup options and additional customization, check out the documentation.

Don't forget to save telescope.lua and exit Neovim with :wq.
Next, we need to tell our init.vim that a lua file exists somewhere:

In my case, I would state:

lua require('kankys') by pasting it into ~/.config/nvim/init.vim

A couple of notes: * Paste this command under the vim-plug function ( `` call plug#end() )!

What does it do? At first it looks a bit magical and understanding it requires knowledge of Vim search, but basically this command will search for a lua file in your Vim runtime.
in our case it is:

~/.config/nvim/lua/your-directory-name/telescope.lua

Instead of requiring every configuration file in our init.vim, we can just require the namespace directory. For this to work, we'll need to add a new file to our namespace directory called init.lua:

cd ~/.config/nvim/lua/your-directory-name
touch init.lua

The * init.lua file can be thought of as an index file. Inside init.lua we can load all our configuration files.

In init-lua let's put the following code:

require('your-directory-name/telescope')

You can easily understand everything I've said above if you look at the nvim configuration files here on Git.
From now on, all new lua configuration files will be in lua/your-directory-name.

Telescope

Telescope has a number of commands that can be used, :Telescope in NORMAL mode in Neovim. A quick way to see all the available commands is to type :Telescope followed by a space and then click <Tab>. The tab button opens a list of autocomplete, available commands in Telescope. You can navigate the list using <Tab> and <Shift-Tab> in the opposite direction.
The Telescope command is shown below, for demonstration purposes: :Telescope find_files

You can view the Telescope documentation in Neovim by:

:h telescope