For my daily work I use the stable release of neovim (Version 0.4.4 as the time of writing) in conjunction with CoC and a large monolithic, grown over time configuration file.

Out of curiosity I wanted to have a playground for neovim's 0.5 lsp support and a clean starting point to rethink my configuration, used plugins and maybe try some new stuff.

However, it was a very important subject to me that none of all the experimentation and restructuring would interfere with my working setup.

So I came up with a simple wrapper script which can be used to install and update neovim nightly and use the bundled configuration located in the same path the script is in.

Here are the necessary steps for installing and using it

export NVIM_NIGHTLY_DIR="$HOME/.local/share/nvim/nightly"
mkdir -p "$NVIM_NIGHTLY_DIR"
cd "$NVIM_NIGHTLY_DIR"
git clone https://github.com/Buckmeister/nvim-nightly.git .
./nvim-nightly.sh

Optionally, you can alias the script by adding this to your shell configuration

export NVIM_NIGHTLY_DIR="$HOME/.local/share/nvim/nightly"
alias nvn="$NVIM_NIGHTLY_DIR/nvim-nightly.sh"

Or symlink it to some directory included in your $PATH. For example:

ln -s "$NVIM_NIGHTLY_DIR/nvim-nightly.sh" "$HOME/.local/bin/nvn"

In order to perform an update of neovim's nightly distribution, use the '-u' command line parameter.

nvn -u

Please see for all needed installation steps regarding os side requirements for plugin and lsp-config dependecies.

Have fun!