Setting up Neovim for Gno development

Gnolang (Gno) is an interpretation of the widely-used Golang (Go) programming language for blockchain created by Cosmos co-founder Jae Kwon in 2022 to mark a new era in smart contracting. - About the Gnolang, the Gno Language

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In this post, I'm going to walk through setting up a development environment for Gno in Neovim. At the end, we'll have error diagnostics, syntax highlighting, auto-formatting, and basic intellisense (autocomplete + hover information) for the Gno standard library.

The final result

For the purposes of this post, I'm going to be using the AstroNvim configuration but this isn't strictly required: as long as you have nvim-lspconfig and nvim-treesitter, you should be able to follow along.

Step 1: Install tree-sitter-go

Navigate to ~/.config/nvim/lua/plugins/treesitter.lua (or equivalent) and make sure that go is listed in ensure_installed:

ensure_installed = { "c", "lua", "vim", "vimdoc", "query", "go" }

Step 2: Assign a syntax with Tree-sitter

Navigate to ~/.config/nvim/lua/plugins/configs/nvim-treesitter.lua (or equivalent) and add these two lines:

vim.cmd 'autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *gno set filetype=gno'
vim.treesitter.language.register('go', 'gno')

The first line creates an autocommand to assign the gno filetype to all *.gno files. The second registers the gno filetype with the Go parser.

Step 3: Configure gnols

Download a binary from the gnols releases page and save it somewhere.

Navigate to ~/.config/nvim/lua/user/init.lua (or equivalent; wherever you customize nvim-lspconfig) and add the following:

return {
  lsp = {
    formatting = {
      format_on_save = true,
    },
    servers = {
      "gnols",
    },
    config = {
      gnols = function()
        return {
          cmd = { "path/to/your/gnols/binary" };
          filetypes = {"gno"};
          root_dir = require("lspconfig.util").root_pattern('.git', 'gno.mod');
          settings = {
            gno = "path/to/you/gno/binary",
            precompileOnSave = true,
            buildOnSave = false,
            -- the clone location of github.com/gnolang/gno
            root = "path/to/local/clone/gno",
          };
        }
      end,
    },
  },
}

Now, when you open a Gno file, you should see syntax highlighting and status bar indicators that gnols is active:

Step 4: Write Gno code!

After following these steps, you'll now have:

• Syntax highlighting for .gno files;
• autocomplete for the Gno standard library;
• hover information (bound to ('n', 'K')) for the Gno standard library; and
• the ability to auto-format your Gno files (set to on-file-save).