After failing to get some plugins to work with VS Code I decided that perhaps a simpler editor like Neovim would be a nice candidate for simple programs. after watching a few tutorials and getting myself familiar with the plugin manager ecosystem, I decided to settle on vim-plug.

The thing is, I can’t get Mason to work at all. People recommended it as a simple solution for managing LSPs and it seemed reasonable enough to try. Mason installs, but no Mason-specific command is recognized by Neovim. I can launch the UI manually with require("mason.ui").open(), but that’s that. No list of LSPs I can download, just a blank UI. I have tried reinstalling, downloading an older version, sanity checking everything 10 times. All other plugins I have work as expected. The only other thing which doesn’t seem to work is showcmd which, in theory, should suggest commands as I type them out.

I can’t find any open issue on github regarding this problem. Google search didn’t yield any useful results. My only guess would be that there needs to be a specific order in which I have to load/initialize this plugin.

Here is what my files look like:

1. init.vim

call plug#begin()
Plug 'williamboman/mason.nvim'
Plug 'williamboman/mason-lspconfig.nvim'
Plug 'neovim/nvim-lspconfig'

-- then some other stuff like `Telescope` 
--     which has no interaction with `Mason`

2. init.lua (the whole file)

require("mason").setup()
require("mason-lspconfig").setup()

require("telescope").load_extension("file_browser")
require("telescope").load_extension("project")
require("telescope").load_extension("ui-select")
require("telescope").load_extension("frecency")
require("telescope").load_extension("media_files")

require('nvim-web-devicons').setup()
require('mini.icons').setup()

Any ideas or suggestions besides trying lazy-vim or another plugin manager? Tnx!