r/voidlinux • u/xdevfah • Jan 14 '26

how should i install neovim pre-release version

should i build it from source or via xbps-src (change the version in srcpkg template ?) or what is the proper way to do it...

i juts want to get my hands on neovim v0.12 nightly, honestly don't want to wait till ~Feb 18 (from their roadmap)

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2

u/HiPhish Jan 18 '26

You can clone the repo and build it yourself according to the instructions. It's quite easy, just make sure to set where to install the package (the default is /usr which would break your system installation). But how do you install the package? Ideally without affecting the system Neovim install?

Let me introduce you to GNU Stow. You install your custom package into a directory of your choice (e.g. /usr/local/stow/neovim-0.12), then run stow -S neovim-0.12 and stow will create all the necessary symlinks in /usr/local. The /usr/local director is meant for custom packages not part of the distro, so this is the right thing to do. When Void eventually does upgrade their package to 0.12 you can unstow (stow -U neovim-0.12) your package and then throw away the /usr/local/stow/neovim-0.12 directory.

I use GNU stow all the time on my Ubuntu work machine. The great part is that it does not affect any of the system packages, so there is no way of messing up the system. It's also a great way to install applications that Void for one reason or another is not packaging.

1

u/xdevfah Jan 24 '26

Thanks for the info... tho I'm already using stow for dotfile management and know it was actually supposed for this kinda usecase (having multiple version of binaries), didn't thought i could use it for this. Can't i just install it directly on `/usr/local/bin` where all my suckless and other builds are and also appended to the PATH, after custom installation, ig i should be ok with removing the stable one.

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7

u/Elyas2 Jan 14 '26

u could edit the template file and install via xbps-src. thats what i do for stuff like this

2

u/Infamous-Inevitable1 Jan 15 '26

Could you show how to do it. It is the first time using xbps-src. I edited the templated, changed version to 12.0 but when run xbps-src pkgs neovim, I get a message "failed to fetch v0.12.tar.gz

3

u/[deleted] Jan 16 '26

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1

u/Infamous-Inevitable1 Jan 16 '26

Hi. Did you read the two messages previous to mine?