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I am a new user to neovim, and a moderator on this site said

You seem to imply that you expect there should be a native way to run [filetype] (and to some extent every Ex command) directly in Lua. But that's really not the case.

That's a fair point. I did assume and expect the Lua API to provide full support for everything you could do in Ex. If that not the case, should a lack of functionality in Lua be looked at is a part of the design, or merely things that yet need to be done. Is there a document on Lua in VIM and the design goals or a post on the mailing list detailing this?

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The point of Lua support in NeoVim is not really to replace Ex commands altogether. That wouldn't really be possible (consider commands like :e or :w or :s etc.) or productive. Instead, the point of Lua in NeoVim is to replace Ex commands (and Vimscript to some extent) as the only or main language in which to write plug-ins for NeoVim.

So while rewriting Vimscript plug-ins in Lua makes a lot of sense (and is likely to produce performance and usability gains), there's not really a lot of value in rewriting your configuration in Lua. Even if you do, you're likely to end up using quite a few Ex commands in that, so use of vim.cmd() and friends is the way to go there.

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    I would love to know why there isn't a nvim_write_buf(handle) api call in Lua. If by design, that seems weird. There is an nvim_list_bufs()
    – Evan Carroll
    Commented Apr 7, 2022 at 2:21

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