Migrating To Neovim v0.12.0 Challenge Faced And Solution Found

Kevin Asaria — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 11:21:10 +0000

A week ago I saw that there was a new version of Neovim(v0.12.0) out
and I decide to upgrade to it. These are the challenges that I faced
and how I solved it.

Context, as is required nowadays. I use LazyVim to transform the basic neovim to be a capable IDE. And indeed I do not do much configuration cause I have not learnt to and the out of the box experience has served me well. I just install LSPs through mason and so far I have not faced any issue.

I thought that switching to neovim v0.12 would be as easy as downloading the binary , deleting the current one and replacing it with the new one. Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

However, I came across a problem whereby the UI broke and I kept getting this error

E5108: Lua: vim/_core/editor.lua:0: nvim_exec2()[1]..BufReadPost Autocommands for "*": Vim(append):Lua callback: /usr/share/nvim/runtime/lua/vim/treesitter/languagetree.lua:208: /usr/share/nvim/runtime/lua/vim/treesitter/languagetree.lua:391: attempt to call method 'set_timeout' (a nil value)

After perusing through this error message, I guessed that it was an issue to do with treesitter as there was a change made about it in the new version. This article explains more about it. So I installed treesitter on my system using cargo.

However, the UI problem persisted and I was getting a bit frustrated and for a moment turned to explore the code I was interested in on vscode but it was a hard change since my built muscle memory made it feel unusable.

So I went back and looked at the error, I tried reinstalling LazyVim again by replacing the old configs as mentioned in their installation guide but the problem persisted. Loosing patience, I came to the grave realisation that maybe it was time to familiarise myself with vscode. Anyway, it is what everyone uses nowadays.

I decided to make one last shot in finding a solution before bidding my beloved editor good bye. Looking at the error message, I saw a curious path in the error message '/usr/share/nvim/runtime/...' . I decided to delete it. I thought it would get reinstalled back when I reinstalled LazyVim. It wasn't and even the LazyVim installation could not take place. I got the truncated error below when I opened nvim

E5113: Lua chunk: vim/_init_packages.lua:0: module 'vim.uri' not found: no field package.preload['vim.uri']

which led me to this github issue which explained I had to copy my specific neovim version's runtime to the path '/usr/local/share/nvim'. In my case I had to do:

git clone https://github.com/neovim/neovim.git
cd neovim
git checkout v0.12.0
sudo cp -r runtime /usr/local/share/nvim

And now things are working as expected and I can breathe a sigh of relief. As you have seen, it was just a matter of going with my gut feeling in order to fix this issue. I don't think changing versions is as hectic in vscode as in neovim. I know it is as skill issue but if someone like me who is used to getting beaten by software felt so frustrated, I imagine that a less patient user would have already moved on.

Thank you for your time and hope this helped you.

My Journey Into Elixir

Kevin Asaria — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 08:23:06 +0000

I have always been interested in learning programming languages rather than frameworks of a particular language. Last year(2020) I decided to learn a functional language having heard so much buzz around them.

Now the question was which functional programming language would I embark to learn. At that time the only functional languages that I had heard of were Lisp and Haskell but then the youtube algorithms kicked in and gave the the video Elixir: The Documentary by honeypot.

I liked the emphasis they put on hardware , that is, computers are getting more cores and other languages are not designed to utilise such infrastructure. In the video they also stated that it could be used in IoT and its use reduced the use of server resources. When I heard all this I was hooked.

That's how the my journey began with Elixir. It has been a slow journey but currently I am learning the Phoenix framework for building web applications for a project I am planning to undertake.

This is just to encourage you to peek into the Elixir language and get a different perspective of what programming can be. Like pattern matching instead of assignments when using the = operator or spawning processes to do some work.

The journey continues slowly but surely.

Forem: Kevin Asaria

Migrating To Neovim v0.12.0 Challenge Faced And Solution Found

My Journey Into Elixir