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Tidying Neovim for a Claude-and-Ollama stack

· nixosai

Right after putting my zsh on a diet I turned the same eye on Neovim. Same disease, different editor: things I’d enabled once, stopped using, and never removed — plus a NixOS-specific bug that had been failing silently for weeks.

My AI stack is deliberately narrow: Claude (via Claude Code) for the heavy agentic work, Antigravity (agy) as a second opinion, and Ollama for anything that should never leave the machine. There is no Copilot here and no Codeium. But my nvim config didn’t know that yet.

Dropping Codeium

Codeium was an ai.codeium LazyVim extra I’d added in a more promiscuous phase. It wanted an account and a network round-trip for completions I now get locally. Out it went.

The interesting bit is how it went. LazyVim normally manages extras through its :LazyExtras UI — which is imperative state that lives outside my flake. That’s exactly the kind of thing I don’t want on NixOS. So lazyvim.json is now declarative, checked into the repo, with no codeium entry. The flake is the source of truth for which extras exist, not a TUI I clicked through six months ago and forgot.

Mason doesn’t work here, so turn it off

Mason is the LazyVim default for installing LSP servers and formatters. It downloads prebuilt binaries — which do not run on NixOS, because they’re linked against an FHS layout that doesn’t exist. People burn hours on this.

The right answer is to stop fighting it. LSPs and formatters come from Nix, on PATH:

home.packages = with pkgs; [
  rust-analyzer pyright ruff
  nixd gopls nodePackages.prettier
];

And Mason gets a ten-line mason.lua that disables it and its auto-install hooks. I verified rust-analyzer, pyright and ruff still attach to buffers with Mason fully off — they do, because they were always coming from Nix anyway. Mason was a second, broken package manager bolted onto the one that actually works.

Adding the local layer back

With the dead weight gone, I wired in the Ollama coding stack I actually wanted:

  • minuet-ai.nvim — inline fill-in-the-middle completion against Ollama’s qwen2.5-coder:7b, surfaced as a blink.cmp source with a score offset so it ranks sensibly against LSP completions. Throttled, and OLLAMA_ENDPOINT overrides the host so my laptop can borrow the workstation’s GPU. Copilot, but local.
  • codecompanion.nvim — chat, inline and agentic edits against the bigger qwen2.5-coder:14b, under <leader>o. Claude keeps <leader>a, Ollama gets <leader>o, and <leader>ag drops agy into a terminal split. Three AIs, three leaders, no overlap.
  • oil.nvim — an editable file explorer that Claude Code can hook for @-mentions.

Everything points at the same models the rest of the machine uses. Nothing new to install, nothing to authenticate.

The bug that was failing every sync

This is the one that actually annoyed me. Every :Lazy sync showed blink.cmp as Failed (1) and I’d been ignoring it. The error, once I read it:

E152: Cannot open .../doc/tags for writing

lazy.nvim runs :helptags doc/ after every sync to rebuild help tags. But blink.cmp was installed via Home Manager’s home.file, which symlinks it into the read-only Nix store. You can’t write doc/tags into a read-only directory, so helptags failed, every time.

home.file stays read-only even with recursive = true — that’s by design. The fix is to copy the plugin into a writable directory on activation instead of symlinking it, and make the copy idempotent with a source stamp so it only re-copies when the store path actually changes:

# copy-on-activation: writable dir, re-copied only when the
# blink.cmp store path changes (stamped to avoid churn)
home.activation.blinkCmp = lib.hm.dag.entryAfter ["writeBoundary"] ''
  # ... compare stored stamp, rsync from $src if different ...
'';

After that, doc/tags is writable, Lazy sync finishes clean, and the editor stops lying to me about its own health.

The pattern

Both cleanups — zsh and nvim — were the same shape. Remove the tools that duplicate what Nix already does (Mason, zplug, oh-my-zsh’s plugins). Remove the integrations for services I don’t use (Codeium, Copilot). Make the config declarative so it can’t drift behind a UI. And read the errors you’ve been trained to scroll past — they’re usually pointing at the exact thing you should delete.

Verified on p620 and razer: plugins install and load, the FIM endpoint returns completions, LSPs attach with Mason off, and there’s not a single Codeium or Copilot warning left at startup. Quiet is the goal.

Written by Olaf Krasicki-Freund · LinkedIn · GitHub