Smart Window Resizing in Neovim

2025-04-12

I'm looking for work! (click to expand)

If you have questions or thoughts on the post I'd love to hear about it! I'm currently looking for work in the northeastern US. I'll be graduating with a BS in both Computer Science and Cyber Operations at the end of the school year. I have worked in web application development and Java, and I have experience in Rust, C++, Python, and various other languages. If you're curious about what I've done in the past, I keep up a short list of projects here or contact me to give me a place to send my resume. I figure anyone who reads my posts will have an interesting offer, so all leads are appreciated!

The last day or two, I've been refitting my Neovim windowing config. Nothing too wild, just fixing a few warts here and there. What follows is a few different snippets for different behaviors I wanted. Hopefully one of these is useful to someone, even if only as a reference (something definitely needs said about the Neovim documentation searchability situation). If you want to see these in their context, links will be left below each example. The links may fall out of date, so I've linked them to the specific commit.

Also, if you're interested in this, I credit chrisgrieser who used to run a blog called Nano Tips For Vim, which was immensely helpful to me in figuring out all of my Neovim configs but was sadly taken offline as of 2025-06-12.

Turn Off Line Numbers for Small Windows

 1local set_numbers = function(value, window)
 2	vim.api.nvim_set_option_value("number", value, { win = window })
 3	vim.api.nvim_set_option_value("relativenumber", value, { win = window })
 4end
 5local window_size_threshold = 40
 6
 7vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd("WinResized", {
 8	callback = function()
 9		for _, win in ipairs(vim.api.nvim_list_wins()) do
10			local width = vim.api.nvim_win_get_width(win)
11			if width < window_size_threshold then
12				set_numbers(false, win)
13			else
14				set_numbers(true, win)
15			end
16		end
17	end,
18})

See it in context!

Bring Window Into Focus

 1local win_focus = function()
 2    -- Uncomment if you use either of these plugins
 3	-- require("dapui").close()
 4	-- require("nvim-tree.api").tree.close()
 5
 6	local current_win = vim.api.nvim_get_current_win()
 7	local windows = vim.api.nvim_list_wins()
 8	vim.api.nvim_win_set_width(0, vim.o.columns - (#windows * 20))
 9	for _, win in ipairs(windows) do
10		if win ~= current_win then
11			vim.api.nvim_win_set_width(win, 20)
12		end
13	end
14end
15
16keymap("n", "<leader>rs", function()
17	vim.api.nvim_win_set_width(0, 20)
18end)
19keymap("n", "<leader>rf", win_focus)

See it in context!

Resizing Mappings

This requires the winresize.nvim plugin.

 1local win_resize = function(win, amt, dir)
 2	return function()
 3		require("winresize").resize(win, amt, dir)
 4	end
 5end
 6
 7wk_add("<leader>r", "Window Resize")
 8keymap("n", "<leader>rh", win_resize(0, 10, "left"))
 9keymap("n", "<leader>rj", win_resize(0, 3, "down"))
10keymap("n", "<leader>rk", win_resize(0, 3, "up"))
11keymap("n", "<leader>rl", win_resize(0, 10, "right"))
12keymap("n", "<leader>r=", "<C-w>=", { desc = "Equalize Windows" })

See it in context!