u/S1M0N38

I've moved from session terminal based setup to tmux (3.6+). here is my simple self-contained setup. tmux (or similar multiplexer) are by far the easier solution for agent orchestration for terminal lovers.

repo: https://github.com/S1M0N38/tau

TL;DR: I've updated my Neovim plugin template (base.nvim) with a .agents/skills directory to give coding agents the exact context they need to write better Neovim plugins.

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A couple of years ago, I created S1M0N38/base.nvim, borrowing ideas from other templates and updating them to modern tools for Nvim plugin development.

I've been using that to create personal plugins with pretty much the same schema. I like to start from a familiar template which automates all the daunting stuff like CI/CD, changelog generation, automatic releases, doc patterns, ...

Whenever I encountered a recurring issue in Neovim, I'd start by hacking together some custom Lua scripts in my config. Then, if I found that useful, I packaged these functionalities into small personal plugins (that's why I created base.nvim in the first place).

There are repetitive operations when writing simple plugins: define function APIs (user and private), add nvim commands (e.g., :HelloWorld), define user options tables for the plugin, write the doc/plugin.txt, checkhealth, maybe some default keymaps, etc. But the actual plugin logic was usually very simple. The core logic rarely needs to be original; once you find a pattern that works (like toggling UI elements or spawning jobs), you just adapt it to your specific use case.

Fast-forward to 2026. Coding agents have become extremely competent in writing lua code, but they still have some issues in plugin development (unless properly instructed):

• Using old/deprecated nvim APIs
• Structuring codebases suboptimally
• Guessing at implementation patterns on their own
• Lacking clear ways to test the code they produce
• ...

But their intelligence is not the bottleneck; the ability to interact with the nvim plugin dev env is the real one.

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base.nvim (v3) is trying to address this gap.

I've updated the template to recent versions of dev tools that I like to use in 2026:

• follow nvim-best-practices
• LuaCATS type annotations with LuaLS checking
• mini.test + luassert test suite
• StyLua formatting and linting
• CI with lint, typecheck, and test (stable + nightly)
• Automated releases via release-please with GitHub and LuaRocks publishing
• Health checks and vimdoc documentation

and a provider-agnostic coding agent skill dir (.agents/skills/)

• nvim-init: Initialize plugin project and verify development environment
• nvim-plugin: Plugin development best practices and patterns
• nvim-test: Execute tests and diagnose failures
• nvim-doc: Write and update vimdoc help documentation
• nvim-commit: Create conventional commits for release-please
• nvim-help: Search Neovim's built-in :help documentation

Disclaimer: I've tested this new template by developing simple plugins using the Pi agent + GLM 5.1. If you are developing something more complex/original, just using the coding agent can slow you down and produce low-quality code.

I hope that this template helps to lower the barrier even more in simple personal plugin development. Arcane vimscript is just a vestige of the past.

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Edit: btw if you don't want to use coding agents in your development, just delete the .agents/skills dir and you are go good to go. skills are just md files, there are no fancy AI integration in this repo.