Packer.nvim: Early plugin loading

[kraftwerk28]

Thanks for nice plugin manager! Is there some way to load plugin at time when I call use function? Some plugins (e.g. bufferline) require that they are loaded before init.vim is processed, otherwise they won't work.

[akinsho]

@kraftwerk28 👋🏾 I actually wrote that plugin, that shouldn't be the case anymore for bufferline. I think there was an old issue in nvim that meant that wasn't working correctly before but it should work fine now with a normal use declaration in packer.

[kraftwerk28]

Here is how I load bufferline: https://github.com/kraftwerk28/dotfiles/blob/master/.config/nvim/lua/plugins.lua#L21-L28
My neovim version is v0.5.0-dev+1027-g0f2d37f11, but the problem still remains for me. I have tabline like this right now

[akinsho]

@kraftwerk28 have you run PackerCompile and restarted neovim? That's the usual flow for installing packer plugins

Your setup doesn't look too dissimilar from mine i.e. I call setup in the config field inside a function

[kraftwerk28]

Yes, I ran :PackerCompile, the problem remains, also put some logs (echom & print) to determine order of evaluation and plugins seem to load at last

[kraftwerk28]

Is it required to use init.lua instead of init.vim?

[akinsho]

@kraftwerk28 nope using either should work fine. One thing of note in your config is that you are using both packer.init and packer.startup, I'm not a packer expert but I believe using just startup is enough. Although I'm not sure what's going on specifically. If you try manually running packadd nvim-bufferline.lua then running lua require('bufferline').setup{} that that do anything? also are your other plugins loading correctly?

[kraftwerk28]

Just temporarily tried installing bufferline with vim-plug and encountered same problem, so it's definitely not a packer issue

[akinsho]

@kraftwerk28 you can raise an issue over on my repo and we can discuss it there, on an unrelated note I just loaded bufferline in a minimal vimrc and it works fine. I wonder if you could try the same i.e. just loading your plugin manager no other config and just bufferline to see if it works. I haven't really had anyone report that it wasn't loading before (since the opt vs start dir thing was resolved months ago)

example minimal init.vim

call plug#begin(stdpath('data') . '/plugged') " or use packer (this is just an old example)
Plug 'akinsho/nvim-bufferline.lua'
call plug#end()

lua << EOF
require'bufferline'.setup()
EOF

set termguicolors

[kraftwerk28]

You're right, setting up config from scratch solves the issue. I'm going to investigate what's wrong with my setup. Thank you
UPD: I found that lightline interferes with bufferline, here's the solution.

[akinsho]

Ah yep, didn't notice you were using lightline. Yeah it takes over the tabline, I'll add a warning to the README so it's clearer 👍🏿

[wbthomason]

It seems like this is (1) resolved and (2) not a packer issue, so I'm going to mark as closed. Feel free to reopen if those conditions aren't true!