til/neovim/run-nvim-with-factory-defaults.md

Run nvim With Factory Defaults

Most of the fun of using Neovim is tailoring it to your exact needs with custom configurations. Your configuration can be made up of environment variables, init.lua/init.vim, and user directories on the runtimepath.

Perhaps though, you want to load neovim with its "factory defaults". You want to ignore all your custom config and your shada (shared data) file. I wanted to do just that recently to verify that neovim has the ft-manpage plugin enabled by default (as opposed to enabled somewhere in the labryinth of my config files).

The --clean flag does just this. It loads built-in plugins, but none of the user defined config.

$ nvim --clean

This is different than nvim -u NONE which excludes all plugins, including built-in ones.

See man nvim and :help --clean for more details.