Installing Neovim from source

The version of Neovim in the APT repo for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is 0.9.5. To install the latest stable version (0.11.0 at time of writing), it must be compiled from source.

Installing from source

Install the build dependencies:

sudo apt install build-essential cmake curl gettext ninja-build

Fetch the source code:

git clone https://github.com/neovim/neovim
cd neovim
git switch -d v0.11.0

Compile it with the installation prefix set to ~/.local (assuming ~/.local/bin is on your PATH):

make CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME/.local

Optionally, run the tests (took ~5 min on my machine):

make test

Install it into ~/.local:

make install
nvim --version
nvim -c checkhealth

Uninstalling

To later uninstall it, come back to this directory and run:

cmake --build build/ --target uninstall

If the build subdirectory no longer exists, it is simpler to just run:

rm ~/.local/bin/nvim
rm -r ~/.local/{lib,share}/nvim/
rm ~/.local/share/**/nvim.*