HieuNguyen

How I Tamed DevOps Chaos with NeoVim and LazyVim

How I Tamed DevOps Chaos with NeoVim and LazyVim

Published on July 10, 2026

Managing dozens of microservices, massive infrastructure codebases, CI/CD pipelines, and ad-hoc scripts is the daily reality of a DevOps engineer. If you try to run all of this inside traditional heavy IDEs, your developer environment quickly becomes a sluggish, resource-hogging bottleneck.

In Part 1 of this series, I explained why I left traditional IDEs behind. Today, we are opening the hood of my custom NeoVim and LazyVim setup. We will go through the exact plugins, configurations, and shortcuts I use to tame DevOps chaos, run inline AI models, develop iOS/Swift applications, and execute REST requests right inside my terminal.

Visual Aesthetics: Nordic Transparency

A premium workspace needs to look beautiful and feel distraction-free. For my colorscheme, I use Nordic (AlexvZyl/nordic.nvim). To make it merge seamlessly with a modern transparent terminal (such as WezTerm or Ghostty), I strip out all solid backgrounds.

In my colorscheme.lua configuration, I hook into the ColorScheme autoevent to set background colors (bg) to NONE for all core UI elements:

-- Stripping normal, floating, and file explorer backgrounds
local hl_groups = {
  "Normal", "NormalNC", "NormalFloat", "FloatBorder", "SignColumn",
  "StatusLine", "StatusLineNC", "WinBar", "WinBarNC", "WinSeparator",
  "SnacksNormal", "SnacksFloatNormal", "SnacksFloatBorder", "SnacksPicker",
  "NeoTreeNormal", "NeoTreeNormalNC"
}
for _, group in ipairs(hl_groups) do
  vim.api.nvim_set_hl(0, group, { bg = "NONE", ctermbg = "NONE", force = true })
end

To complete the premium aesthetic, I use Smear Cursor (sphamba/smear-cursor.nvim) with a vibrant dark orchid color (#9932cc). It adds a smooth smear animation when the cursor jumps between windows, scrolls, or switches buffers, making tracking the cursor effortless.

Inline AI: CodeCompanion with OpenRouter

Instead of leaving the terminal to copy-paste code snippets into browser-based AI chats, I use CodeCompanion (olimorris/codecompanion.nvim) configured with OpenRouter.

I have written custom Lua commands to quickly switch models (e.g., Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite, Claude 3.5 Sonnet) and check settings:

  • :CodeCompanionSelectModel — Switches active OpenRouter models.
  • :CodeCompanionShowConfig — Verifies current adapter and model status.

AI Keymaps

  • <leader>ac — Toggle CodeCompanion Chat interface.
  • <leader>ai — Bring up CodeCompanion inline actions on selected code blocks.
  • <leader>am — Change active AI model on the fly.

DevOps & Infrastructure Stack

A DevOps workspace is heavily focused on Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and APIs. I configure custom plugins to keep my workflows inside the editor:

1. Terraform & LSP

In my lsp.lua setup, I configure the terraformls language server. I also utilize markdown_oxide to write clean, interconnected docs and runbooks with wikilink support.

2. Kulala: HTTP client inside NeoVim

I replaced Postman with Kulala (mistweaverco/kulala.nvim). It detects .http and .rest files, allowing me to draft and run raw HTTP requests directly in the editor. Read more

2.1 features

  • Protocols: HTTP, gRPC, GraphQL, WebSocket, Streaming
  • Variables: Environment, Document, Request, Dynamic, Prompt, http-client.env files
  • Importing and running requests from external *.http files
  • Importing and saving request/response data to/from external files
  • JavaScript (Jetbrains compatible) Pre-request, Post-request, Conditional, Inline, External
  • TypeScript Pre-request, Post-request, Conditional, Inline, External
  • Authentication: Basic, Bearer, Digest, NTLM, OAuth2, Negotiate, AWS, SSL
  • Response formatting and live filtering
  • Assertions, automated testing and reporting
  • Built-in LSP completion
  • Scratchpad: for making requests
  • Compatibility with IntelliJ HTTP Client

2.2 shortcuts

  • <leader>rr — Run the HTTP request under the cursor.
  • <leader>ra — Execute all requests in the current file.
  • <leader>co — Copy the current request as a ready-to-use cURL command.
  • <leader>ct — Toggle the split view between response headers and payload body.

2.3 Demos

  • init new file .http then define http methods for make singple request by shortcut <leader>rr
# Define dynamic variables at the top
@baseUrl = https://httpbin.org
@authToken = YourSecretBearerToken Here

### Request 1: Simple GET Request
# @name FetchingData
GET {{baseUrl}}/get
User-Agent: Neovim Kulala Client
Authorization: Bearer {{authToken}}

### Request 2: Send a JSON POST Payload
# @name SubmitPayload
POST {{baseUrl}}/post
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "name": "Paul Nguyen",
  "status": "Testing Kulala API Client",
  "editor": "Neovim 0.12+"
}

ikuala-demo

iOS & Swift Development on NeoVim

You do not need to boot up heavy Xcode instances to build Swift projects. I configure a fully-fledged Swift development system inside NeoVim:

  • SourceKit LSP: In lsp.lua, I bind the native sourcekit language server using dynamic root matching patterns like Package.swift and buildServer.json.

You also explore how to quick start the swiftUI on neovim from here

shortcuts

  • Xcodebuild Integration (wojciech-kulik/xcodebuild.nvim):
    • <leader>ib — Build project.
    • <leader>ir — Build and run project.
    • <leader>it — Run tests.
    • <leader>id — Select simulators or physical devices.
    • <leader>ii — Dynamically generate and preview SwiftUI layouts.

demos

  • quick build project by <leader>I to showing up Xcodebuild & Actions swift-demo

  • another sub-menus show it up by <leader>i swift-demo

Enterprise Environments: Java & Gradle

Even heavy JVM enterprise workloads run fast in this setup. In my java.lua configuration, I set up mfussenegger/nvim-jdtls to configure Java language features:

  • Resolves the Eclipse Equinox Launcher paths dynamically.
  • Isolates unique project workspace folders under ~/.local/share/nvim/jdtls/workspace/ depending on the directory name.
  • Interfaces directly with SDKMAN paths to lock onto Java 21 (JavaSE-21) by default.

Notes and Daily Planning

For journaling, planning DevOps architectures, and tracking daily logs, I run Note (gsuuon/note.nvim) under ~/notes. To avoid keymap conflicts with LazyVim’s default notifications, I re-mapped the key bindings to the <leader>o (Organize) prefix:

Read more

shortcuts

  • <leader>od — Open Daily Note.
  • <leader>oi — Open Notes Index.
  • <leader>os — Live search notes using Telescope grep.
  • <leader>oc — Save and close notes instantly.

Demos

  • just hit <leader>os to open search notes
  • i usually open daily note by <leader>od Notes plugins

Conclusions

By swapping heavy graphical interfaces for terminal-based counterparts and orchestrating them with LazyVim, I have built an environment that uses less than 150MB of RAM at startup. Yet, it handles complex LSPs, AI helpers, iOS builds, REST API testing, and personal documentation without breaking a sweat.

In the next part, we will look at how i leverage the lazyvim for quick coding, adjust file name or adjusting multiple cursor like vscode.