Dependencies

Third-party libraries bundled into Neovim. The canonical source of truth is cmake.deps/deps.txt. Versions below are accurate as of 2026-04-30.

Bundled libraries

All of these are downloaded by CMake during the deps build (make deps) and statically linked into the nvim binary by default (USE_BUNDLED=1).

Library	Purpose	Pinned version
libuv	Cross-platform async I/O. The event-loop substrate.	v1.52.1
LuaJIT	The Lua interpreter shipped in the binary.	commit 18b087cd2c
Lua 5.1	Reference Lua implementation. Used as a fallback (-DPREFER_LUA=ON) and in tests.	5.1.5
luv	Lua bindings to libuv. Powers vim.uv.	1.52.1-0
lpeg	Parsing-Expression-Grammar library. Powers vim.lpeg, vim.re, the LuaCATS parser.	1.1.0
lua-compat-5.3	Lua 5.1 ↔ 5.3 compatibility shims.	v0.13
unibilium	Terminfo parser (the Neovim fork). Used by the TUI.	v2.1.2
tree-sitter	Incremental parser library.	(pinned in deps.txt)
tree-sitter-c, -lua, -vim, -vimdoc, -markdown, -bash, -query	Bundled grammars.	(pinned per parser)
gettext, libiconv	Internationalization (downloaded only on platforms that don't ship them).
win32yank	Windows clipboard helper.	v0.1.1

In-tree forks

Libraries Neovim has fully forked and no longer tracks upstream. Documented at the top of runtime/doc/dev_arch.txt.

Library	Location	Notes
libvterm	src/nvim/vterm/	The in-process terminal emulator used by :terminal and vim.system({pty=true}).
libtermkey	src/nvim/tui/termkey/	The escape-sequence keyboard decoder used by the TUI.

Vendored sources

Libraries Neovim does not own — they are synced from upstream periodically.

Library	Location	Purpose
cjson	src/cjson/	JSON codec used by the Vimscript json_* functions.
mpack	src/mpack/	msgpack codec used by msgpack-rpc and shada.
klib	src/nvim/klib/	kvec.h, hash maps, intrusive containers.
xdiff	src/xdiff/	LibXDiff. Powers vim.diff and :diffthis.
tee, xxd	src/tee/, src/xxd/	Tiny utilities packaged with the Windows artifact.

Build-time dependencies

Required at build time but not linked into the binary:

Tool	Purpose
CMake (≥ 3.16)	Build system.
Ninja (recommended)	Faster parallel builds.
GCC/Clang/MSVC	C compiler with C99 support.
xgettext, msgfmt	Build translations (optional).
python3	Some build helpers.
ccache / sccache (optional)	Speeds up iterative builds.
gperf	Hash table generation.

Runtime dependencies

The nvim binary itself is statically linked against the bundled deps, but the user's system must provide a few things:

• A POSIX or Windows kernel — no other system dep is hard-required.
• Optionally: a C compiler for tree-sitter grammar compilation (when users add new grammars).
• Optionally: python3 + pynvim for plugins that need the Python provider.
• Optionally: node + neovim npm package for the Node provider.
• Optionally: git for vim.pack.

Health checks (:checkhealth) report which optional bits are missing and what they would enable.

Updating a dependency

1. Bump the URL and SHA256 in cmake.deps/deps.txt.
2. Run make distclean && make deps. The hash check confirms the download matches.
3. Run make. If anything broke, fix the bindings.
4. Test: make functionaltest.
5. Commit with build(deps): prefix.

To bisect a dependency bug, set LIBUV_URL (or whichever) to a local path and set DEPS_IGNORE_SHA=TRUE in cmake.deps/CMakeLists.txt. Run make distclean between each rebuild.