Help understanding optional plugins?

[JBlocklove]

I'm quite new to nix so I'm slowly picking through how and why some of this works, but following the example has gotten me a bit confused. I can understand how you'd want to use the optional categories for plugins that only apply to specific filetypes (markdown for example), but the example has the general optional category with things like completion, UI plugins, and other things in there that I assume you'd always want active. Are there reasons these aren't in the startupPlugins?

It looks to me like they always get loaded via packadd in their lua configs, for example in the completion.lua it has the load_w_after function that uses packadd and it seems like that means it's always getting loaded.

local load_w_after = function(name)
  vim.cmd.packadd(name)
  vim.cmd.packadd(name .. '/after')
end

return {
  {
    "cmp-cmdline",
    for_cat = "general.blink",
    on_plugin = { "blink.cmp" },
    load = load_w_after,
  },
...

How is this different than just using a startupPlugins category? Is it something to do with how lze works (something I'm also not super familiar with after coming from lazy.nvim)?

[BirdeeHub]

optionalPlugins could also be called lazyPlugins but the nvim terminology they use in the manual is "optional"

It simply means that they are added to the rtp under pack/myNeovimPackages/opt/<name> rather than pack/myNeovimPackages/start/<name>.

Plugins in start are loaded immediately on startup. If they have files in their plugin/* directory they will be ran, ftplugin files will be taken care of, etc.

Plugins in opt are not loaded immediately. You instead must call vim.cmd.packadd("<name>") to load them

If you call vim.cmd.packadd during your initial init.lua's run, that plugin will be loaded just like it was in start

If you call vim.cmd.packadd any time after that, it will load the things in that plugin's rtp as if it were startup right then, but ignore things in said plugin's after directory (which is why people tell plugin authors not to use the after directory). You can vim.cmd.packadd("<name>/after") if you want to then have the after directory still work when loading them in this way.

lze makes specs which you can have trigger on one of several actions in an easy to use fashion, without needing to learn how to define triggers for these actions yourself.

The default load function for each one is vim.cmd.packadd called with the name of the spec and you can override that if you want.

This lets you schedule the plugin and its related config to load at some later time from within your init.lua in an ergonomic fashion.

---

So, in short, the reason some core things are in optionalPlugins is because I wanted to demonstrate how to lazily load them.

Also, there isnt really much need to lazy load completion, but I did just in case it ever is slow, as if it is slow, running it from init.lua could block first paint momentarily, and also to show how to do it.

[JBlocklove]

Ah, I understand. Thanks!