Improve security by running neovim in a container

jorti@pm.me (Juan Orti Alcaine) — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I use neovim as my editor of choice for the Linux command line. Neovim has a huge ecosystem of plugins, and I use the lazyvim “distribution” which provides a curated set of plugins for people like me that don’t want to spend time configuring neovim.

However this plugin model presents a problem: neovim fetches code from the Internet and executes in your system with your user privileges, with complete access to your files and secrets. With all the chain of supply attack we are hearing about these days, this is a great risk.

In order to reduce the attach surface, I’m running now neovim in a podman container by using a custom wrapper script. This script launches a container with just the minimal access to the host system required to do its job.

Neovim on Apuntes de root

Improve security by running neovim in a container