Hop (Navigation for Neovim)

3 min readFeb 7, 2023

Neovim motions on Speed

Hop is an EasyMotion-like plugin allowing you to jump anywhere in a document with as few keystrokes as possible. It does so by annotating text in your buffer with hints, short string sequences for which each character represents a key to type to jump to the annotated text. Most of the time, those sequences lengths will be between 1 to 3 characters, making every jump target in your document reachable in a few keystrokes.

Requirements

Neovim ≥ 0.5

Installation

Insertion of github repository should be done in plugins.lua file so that Hop gets installed in our IDE.

-- Plugins.lua
return {

    -- Bufferline
    {
        'akinsho/bufferline.nvim',
        dependencies = 'nvim-tree/nvim-web-devicons'
    },

    -- Colorscheme
    {
        'folke/tokyonight.nvim',
    },

    -- Hop (Better Navigation)
    {
        "phaazon/hop.nvim",
        lazy = true,
    },


    -- Lualine
    {
        'nvim-lualine/lualine.nvim',
        dependencies = { 'nvim-tree/nvim-web-devicons' }
    },

    -- Which-key
    {
        'folke/which-key.nvim',
        lazy = true,
    },

}

The lazy keyword enables lazy-loading of Hop plugin. This will only load Hop when you want to search inside the editor.
Save the file using Space + w and Invoke Lazy with Space + p to check the status of extension.

Install the plugin with Shift + i and configure Hop.

Configuration

Create a new file hop-config.lua in your lua directory.
Add Keybinding to use hop when required. This is a minimalist configuration which I use, A better configuration than this can be implemented by diving deep into its documentation provided in thier github repository.

require'hop'.setup { keys = 'etovxqpdygfblzhckisuran', term_seq_bias = 0.5 }

-- Changing the default f keyword
vim.api.nvim_set_keymap('', 'f', "<cmd>lua require'hop'.hint_char1()<cr>", {})

-- Pattern Matching with t keyword
vim.api.nvim_set_keymap('n', 't', "<cmd>HopPattern<CR>", {noremap = true})

Source Hop to Main Config

Include hop-config.lua file in init.lua using require keyword.

require "keymaps"
require "options"
require "hop-config" -- Added this line to initial file
require "lazy-config"
require "lualine-config" 
require "bufferline-config"
require "whichkey"

Restart Neovim and Navigate anywhere through “f” keyword.

Open any file -> Type ‘f’ to search any alphabet -> Hop enables navigations -> Navigate through the suggestions.

Hop Alternatives

Neovim From Scratch

If you want a complete installation and configuration of Neovim from Scratch, then you can head over to my NEOVIM SERIES.
This series is updated regularly, with updates and inclusion of newer plugins which improves the wholesome IDE experience of Neovim.