avante.nvim: AI copilot in Neovim

Lately, I’ve been trying out the Cursor IDE at work. The editor itself is VS Code under the hood, but it adds a bunch of AI-driven features on top, much like Github Copilot.

I’ve found Cursor quite enjoyable to use, especially in the unfamiliar corners of the codebase, where I’m trying to understand what’s going on. However, my ideal editing environment would be Neovim with these capabilities thrown in.

Enter avante.nvim, which emulates the behavior of Cursor from within Neovim. Over the past few days, I’ve been playing around it, and found it quite pleasant to use.

Basic setup

The initial setup was really easy. I copied over the config from the readme into my lazy.nvim config, and set the provider to Copilot.

  {
    "yetone/avante.nvim",
    dependencies = {
      "nvim-tree/nvim-web-devicons",
      "stevearc/dressing.nvim",
      "nvim-lua/plenary.nvim",
      "MunifTanjim/nui.nvim",
      {
        "MeanderingProgrammer/render-markdown.nvim",
        opts = { file_types = { "markdown", "Avante" } },
        ft = { "markdown", "Avante" },
      },
    },
    build = "make",
    opts = { provider = "copilot" },
  },

If you have Github Copilot already set up using copilot.lua, this just works out of the box! This was great for trying out the plugin before trying out a more advanced setup.

Advanced setup

Now that I’ve played around with the plugin, I want to set it up to use an OpenAI API compatible proxy that lets you use other models as well. I’ve been hearing good things about Claude 3.5 Sonnet, so I wanted to try that out first. we’ll replace the opts = {...} line with a config function like this:

  {
    "yetone/avante.nvim",
    -- other config options
    config = function()
      local opts = { provider = "copilot" }

      local openai_api_url = os.getenv("OPENAI_API_CHAT_COMPLETIONS")
      if openai_api_url then
        opts.provider = "openai"
        opts.openai = {
          endpoint = openai_api_url,
          model = "anthropic:claude-3-5-sonnet",
          timeout = 30000,
          temperature = 0,
          max_tokens = 4096,
          ["local"] = false,
        }
      end

      require("avante").setup(opts)
    end,
  },

If the OPENAI_API_CHAT_COMPLETIONS env var is set, that indicates we can use the proxy. I’ve set up these env variables in .openairc which is loaded in my .zshrc like this:

[ -f ~/.openairc ] && source ~/.openairc

The .openairc looks something like this, where the URLs should point to some OpenAI compatible proxy:

export OPENAI_API_BASE=https://example.com
export OPENAI_API_CHAT_COMPLETIONS=https://example.com/v1/chat/completions
export OPENAI_API_KEY=some_api_key

Closing thoughts

After using avante.nvim for a couple of days, I’ve quite enjoyed it. It’s reasonably intuitive, and the UI is fantastic for something built out of vim panes. It has a long way to go before it can reach the intuitiveness of Cursor, but for now I’m happy to be able to get some of those features within Neovim.