Jest plugin for Neovim

During the recent VimConf, a core contributor of Neovim presented on Neovim's built in language server protocol (LSP). The presentation can be found on youtube with the title: "Vimconf.live: Neovim Builtin LSP". The demonstration and customization available to this feature seemed superior to coc.nvim, which I use today. So, I decided to give it a test drive.

After working with it on projects of various languages for over a week, the Neovim LSP felt more performant than coc.nvim. It seemed smoother and less jarring overall. Additionally, I found the ease of customization with preexisting plugins, such as completion-nvim and diagnostic-nvim, provided a cleaner and more appealing programming experience.

However, I encountered a small pitfall in my transition from coc.nvim to Neovim's LSP. A jest extension called coc-jest no longer worked for me due to the dependency on coc.nvim. This plugin allows you to run Jest within your editor, which helps streamline development and provide quick feedback. I spend the majority of my time programming with JavaScript and TypeScript with frequent use of Jest, so the absence of this functionality became quite the annoyance. As a result, I decided to try my hand at constructing a similiar plugin without the dependency on coc.nvim, so that this functionality could standalone.

Without previous experience writing a plugin for Neovim, I sought guidance. Neovim's documentation had me covered and provided an example, which serves as a template for getting started. The documentation can be found at Nvim documentation: lua under the subsection entitled "LUA PLUGIN EXAMPLE". Alternatively, in Neovim you can type :help lua-require-example to view the documentation. With the Neovim documentation in hand as well as the Lua Reference Manual, I was off! Once, I uncovered the appropriate APIs for executing nvim commands and invoking the terminal, then the plugin came together rather quickly. The only issue that caught me by surprise was Lua's unique way of pattern matching, which differed from regular expressions and felt somewhat limiting. However, I reached a solution, which got the job done.

In short, the plugin exposes commands for invoking Lua functions that orchestrate Nvim in a manner that runs Jest on the entire project, the file in the current buffer, or even the test name under the user's cursor. The Jest execution outputs within a split buffer.

You can find jest.nvim at: https://github.com/mattkubej/jest.nvim