Setting up Neovim in WSL

In my personal time, I develop on WSL because I only own Windows laptops. I’m a dirty casual, I know. I’ve been learning how to use Neovim recently as a potential replacement to VSCode. The setup has been quite painful, so I thought I might document how I did it in this article.

I assume you already have WSL installed.

Vim is a text editor that lives in your terminal. You’ve probably entered vim by accident at some point if you ran git commit without -m .

Installing Neovim through Homebrew

Unfortunately, sudo apt-get install neovim installs an outdated version of Neovim at the time of writing. Instead, I decided to install Neovim through Homebrew. Run the following command to install Homebrew:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

IMPORTANT: Once the installation completes, it’ll tell you to run a few more commands in the output — don’t skip this! These commands will add brew to your $PATH . Otherwise, you might get a Command not found… error.

Now we can install nvim :

brew install neovim

Great, now we have Neovim in WSL. Test it out:

nvim

You can exit Neovim by either typing :q! and hitting Enter, or by pressing Ctrl+z .

Installing a Nerd Font

We need to use a Nerd Font as our WSL terminal font. Otherwise, certain icons in Neovim will just look like: ▯. In my case, I downloaded the JetBrainsMono Nerd Font (download here). Once the download was completed, I unzipped the directory, selected all the fonts, and right-clicked my selection. This lets you choose the option to “Install all” the fonts.

To use the Nerd Font in our Windows Terminal:

1. Open up Settings ctrl ,
2. Open the tray by clicking the three-lines icon on the top left
3. Click Ubuntu under Profiles to open its profile settings
4. Scroll down to Additional Settings and click Appearance
5. Change Font face to JetBrainsMono Nerd Font