NvSinner

NvSinner was born from a simple frustration: every IDE and code editor kept forcing my hands onto the mouse, while the AI tooling I actually enjoyed was moving into the terminal as CLI agents. So I put everything in the terminal. NvSinner is my open-source Neovim distribution — managed with lazy.nvim and packaged with a one-line installer — that turns Neovim into a Cursor-like AI IDE with no in-editor AI plugin at all. It installs under its own NVIM_APPNAME, so it runs side-by-side with any existing Neovim setup without touching it.

The core idea is AI as a terminal column, not a plugin: any CLI agent — Claude Code, opencode, or just a plain shell — runs in up to nine persistent vertical columns, each carrying a live activity bar that shows whether its agent is thinking or idle. When an agent edits a file on disk, the open buffer reloads automatically and a toast names exactly what changed, turning the editor into a cockpit for supervising agents rather than a text box. A JSON-backed prompt library, a Mason-style settings modal, and a self-discovering command palette round out the workflow — all fully keyboard-driven.

Under the hood it is an exercise in native-first engineering: the activity spinner, disk auto-reload, settings persistence, health checks, and updater are zero-dependency core Lua modules rather than plugins. It ships its own self-contained carbon colorscheme — an oxocarbon / IBM Carbon port — with dark and light variants, transparency, and per-role accent slots, all configurable live from the settings modal. Everything is lazy-loaded (headless cold start sits around 40 ms), plugin versions are pinned to a committed lockfile, and a Plenary test suite covers the core behavior.