Unintuitive plugin ordering in packer_compiled.lua

[Kirens]

As far as I understand, the plugin ordering of use { ... } invocations is not preserved for config loading in packer_compiled.lua. This seems to be contrary to intuitive assumptions. (E.g. as seen in this popular nvim-config: https://github.com/jdhao/nvim-config/blob/8b10be60d45f2505d1f6962014640a123b814614/lua/plugins.lua#L46-L47)

Is this correct and would it be reasonable to preserve the ordering? Or should this just be clarified in the documentation?

[yutkat]

It is true that plugin managers that use packadd will have an undefined loading order. If you are worried about it, you can use something that does not use packadd, such as vim-plug.

If you want to use packer, you can use after to define the startup order, so I use this feature.

packer.nvim/doc/packer.txt

Line 586 in 6afb674

after = string or list, -- Specifies plugins to load before this plugin.

[Kirens]

I suppose that might make it an unfair assumption. Although, I was specifically thinking of the plugins that are not optional. In that case the config seems to be in‑lined in the order that pairs iterate through the table.

packer.nvim/lua/packer/compile.lua

Lines 530 to 534 in 6afb674

	for name, plugin_config in pairs(configs) do
	local lines = { '-- Config for: ' .. name }
	timed_chunk(plugin_config, 'Config for ' .. name, lines)
	vim.list_extend(config_lines, lines)
	end

But I guess the configs are meant to be pretty independent, in general.

[yutkat]

I don't know about impatient.nvim, but if you absolutely want to load it first, you could load it manually first, like packer.

vim.cmd("packadd impatient.nvim")
require('impatient')

...
packer.startup {
  function(use)
    use { "lewis6991/impatient.nvim", opt = true }