I might have forgotten some of the details about this issue, but as long as you are able to run require("yazi").setup() before you enter a directory, it should work. Right now the .setup() has to be run to set up some autocmds that run when a directory is entered - I don't know how else to do it (yet).

Can you add the setup call somewhere in your config? I don't really know anything about packer.nvim, but I might be able to help one small step at a time.

this is my init.lua file

require("yazi").setup({
    open_for_directories = true,

    use_ya_for_events_reading = false,

    use_yazi_client_id_flag = false,

    highlight_groups = {
      -- NOTE: this only works if `use_ya_for_events_reading` is enabled, etc.
      hovered_buffer = nil,
    },

    floating_window_scaling_factor = 1,

    yazi_floating_window_winblend = 0,

    log_level = vim.log.levels.OFF,

    keymaps = {
      show_help = '<f1>',
      open_file_in_vertical_split = '<c-v>',
      open_file_in_horizontal_split = '<c-x>',
      open_file_in_tab = '<c-t>',
      grep_in_directory = '<c-s>',
      replace_in_directory = '<c-g>',
      cycle_open_buffers = '<tab>',
      copy_relative_path_to_selected_files = '<c-y>',
    },

    yazi_floating_window_border = 'rounded',

    clipboard_register = "*",

})

vim.keymap.set("n", "<leader>pv", require("yazi").yazi)

-- some other initialization
require("init")

even when its the first thing initialized in init.lua i have the same problem

I get the same behaviour, so this is reproducible. Can you see if the following approach would work around the issue for you?

vim.api.nvim_create_autocmd('UiEnter', {
  callback = function()
    require('yazi').setup({
      open_for_directories = true,
    })
    vim.keymap.set('n', '<leader>pv', require('yazi').yazi)
  end,
})

My guess is that for the current yazi.nvim implementation to work, it needs to be loaded somehow "later" than other things might be happening. I believe this somehow fixes the loading order as this seems to resolve the issue for me when I tried it without lazy.nvim just now.

Ideally I would recommend switching over to lazy.nvim, but I do understand it might not be possible for everybody. I don't think the loading order is going to change much in the future though, but I might add or change the dependencies. If you get any issues, feel free to send me a message.

this way it works, thank you!