🤖 Enlighten

Turn Neovim into an AI Code Editor

Edit	Chat
Enlighten.Edit.mov	Enlighten.Chat.mov

🔦 Philosophy

I like Neovim. I like writing the code. I also like some AI editing features sometimes.

This plugin does not strive to implement every feature in AI code editors (such as Cursor). It should have just enough power to get you unblocked or plow through some tedium - without leaving the terminal - so you can get on with your day. It should feel like a native Neovim experience.

See TODO's for a list of things I will eventually get to.

🥖 Features

• Generate code from a prompt.
• Edit selected code in place with change highlights.
• Conversational chat without leaving Neovim.
• Conversation and prompt history.
• Edit buffer from chat with the conversation as context.
• Use other tools for reviewing, accepting and rejecting generated code by turning highlights off.
• All OpenAI and Anthropic models can be supported (I can't always keep up though).
• curl is the only dependency!

💾 Setup

Must have Neovim 0.10.0+

curl is required.

You will also need to set the environment variable OPENAI_API_KEY or ANTHROPIC_API_KEY depending on the AI provider you are using.

Installation with lazy.nvim

  {
    "evanmcneely/enlighten.nvim",
    event = "VeryLazy",
    opts = {
      -- ...
    },
    keys = {
      { "<leader>ae", function() require("enlighten").edit() end, desc = "Edit", mode = { "n", "v" } },
      { "<leader>ac", function() require("enlighten").chat() end, desc = "Chat", mode = { "n", "v" } },
      { "<leader>ay", function() require("enlighten").keep() end, desc = "Keep change", mode = { "n", "v" } },
      { "<leader>aY", function() require("enlighten").keep_all() end, desc = "Keep all changes", mode = "n" },
      { "<leader>an", function() require("enlighten").discard() end, desc = "Discard change", mode = { "n", "v" } },
      { "<leader>aN", function() require("enlighten").discard_all() end, desc = "Discard all changes", mode = "n" },
    },
  },

⚙️ Configuration

This is the default configuration.

  {
    ai = {
      provider = "openai", -- AI provider. Only "openai" or "anthropic" or supported.
      model = "gpt-4o", -- model name for the specified provider. Only chat completion models are supported (plus the o3-mini reasoning model)
      temperature = 0,
      tokens = 4096,
      timeout = 120, -- recommended to keep very high
    },
    settings = {
      context = 500, -- lines above and below the selected text passed to the model as context
        -- Can be "diff" or "change" or "off":
        -- - "diff" will show added and removed lines with DiffAdd and DiffRemove highlights
        -- - "change" when a hunk has both added and removed lines, this will show only generated content with DiffText highlights
        -- - "off" will not add highlights around generated content (use other tooling to review, accept and revert changes)
      diff_mode = "diff",
      edit = {
        width = 80, -- prompt window width
        height = 5, -- prompt window height
        showTitle = true, -- show the title in the prompt window
        showHelp = true, -- show the help footer in the prompt window
        border = "═" -- top/bottom border character of prompt window
      },
      chat = {
        width = 80, -- chat window width
        split = "right", -- split the chat window 'left' or 'right'
      },
    },
  }

To customize this configuration, pass overrides into setup: require('enlighten').setup({...}) .

Using Anthropic as the provider

Example configuration to use Anthropic AI as the completion provider:

  {
    ai = {
      provider = "anthropic",
      model = "claude-3-5-sonnet-20240620",
    },
  }

At the moment, OpenAI's gpt-4o model is a fair bit better at generating code that respects the indentation and formatting of existing code in the buffer.

Feature specific configuration

You can override the AI and Settings configurations for the edit or chat feature using the following feature specific overrides:

  {
    ai = {
      edit = {
        timeout = 30, -- set a lower timeout for the prompt feature only
      },
      chat = {
        model = "o3-mini", -- use a different model for the chat feature only
      }
    },
    settings = {
      edit = {
        -- use minimalist UI
        height = 3,
        showTitle = false,
        showHelp = false,
        border = "",
      },
      chat = {
        diff_mode = "off" -- turn diff highlights off when editing from chat
      }
    }
  }

These are just examples, base settings and all ai configurations can be overridden in this way.

📖 Usage

Prompt completion

Select the code you want to edit (from normal mode, the line under the cursor is considered selected). Open the prompt and write your instructions. The keymaps available to you are:

• <CR> - submit the prompt for completion
• q - close the prompt window (clears any generated code)
• <C-y> - accept the generated code
• <C-o> - scroll back through past prompts
• <C-i> - scroll forward through past prompts

Generated code is diff'd against the initially selected code and highlighted as green (add) or red (remove) appropriately.

Chat

Open the chat window. You can optionally select code from the buffer to have it populate the prompt. The keymaps available to you are:

• <CR> - submit the prompt for completion (normal mode)
• <C-CR> - submit the prompt for completion (insert mode)
• <S-C-CR - AI edit buffer with context from chat (⚠️ Experimental)
• q - close the chat window
• <C-o> - scroll back through past chat conversations
• <C-i> - scroll forward through past chat conversations
• <C-x> - stop the streamed response

Chat responses are streamed into the chat buffer.

@Mentions

⚠️ Experimental

Dependant on nvim-cmp and plenary.nvim.

While using either of the above features, type @ to see a list of available completions.

• @files - Uses vim.ui.select to open a project file picker. Selected file contents are added to the chat/prompt.
• @target - Adds the target buffer content (the buffer your cursor was in when the chat/prompt was initiated) to the chat/prompt.
• @buffers - Adds all open buffers content to the chat/prompt.
• @quickfix - Adds all buffer content from the quickfix list to the chat/prompt.
• @enlighten - Uses vim.ui.select to open a picker with files from a .enlighten/ directory in the project root and home directories. Selected file contents are added to the chat/prompt. This enables reusable custom prompts, instructions or documentation.

If you have not configured vim.ui.select, try snacks.nvim and this simple configuration to make life easy.

  {
    "folke/snacks.nvim",
    lazy=false,
    opts = {
      picker = {
        ui_select = true, -- only use for vim.ui.select
      },
    },
  },

👍 Kudos

• aduros/ai.vim : Which provided the foundation of this project. The two projects look nothing the same now, but ai.vim made me think this was possible.

• Cursor : The AI Code Editor which, in my opinion, has pioneered AI-editor integrations and inspired many features here.

• avante.nvim : A very different experience and ultimate goal, but with a lot of overlap in problems and implementation.

• spinner.nvim : used in this project.

🏎️ TODO

• Persist history across Neovim sessions. ✅
• Approve/Reject generated chunks from file. ✅
• Edit buffer with context from the chat. ✅
• Use codebase as context (files, functions, classes, git history etc.).
  • files ✅
  • lsp
  • git
• Edit multiple buffers with context from chat.