Sergei Bulavintsev

Senior DevOps Engineer AWS, Kubernetes, GitOps

2 minute read

Lately, I’ve been spending most of my time working with Forgejo — a great self-hosted Git service I use for both personal and work projects.

Since almost all my coding happens inside Neovim, I rely heavily on a tight workflow between my editor and Git hosting. I’ve been using folke/snacks.nvim for GitHub integration, and the experience is fantastic: open PRs, issues, reviews — all directly from within Neovim.

However, I manage everything on Forgejo, not GitHub, so I wanted to replicate this flow.

Enter snacks-tea.nvim — a small Neovim plugin that wraps around the tea CLI to bring Forgejo/Gitea functionality directly into Neovim.

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Motivation

snacks.gh provides an elegant GitHub integration via gh. Forgejo has its own command-line tool, tea, with feature parity for most Git operations (issues, pull requests, repositories, notifications, etc.). So the idea was simple: keep the same UX and flow from snacks, but swap out the backend.

How it Works

snacks-tea.nvim is designed as a thin wrapper. It shells out to tea under the hood, parses the JSON output, and displays the data inside floating Neovim buffers.

Minimal setup example:

{
  "folke/snacks.nvim",
  dependencies = {
    "your-username/snacks-tea.nvim"
  },
  opts = {
    tea = {
      enabled = true,
      tea = {
        cmd = "tea",  -- Path to tea binary
        login = nil,  -- Specific login to use (nil = auto-detect)
        remote = "origin",  -- Git remote to use
      },
    }
  }
}

Once installed, you can list issues and pull requests directly:

  • :TeaPR
  • :TeaPRCreate

The plugin reuses the same UI patterns as snacks.gh: floating windows with preview panes and telescope-like selection. You can navigate, preview, and open links straight from Neovim.

Example Flow

  1. Browse current Forgejo PRs: 
    :TeaPR
  2. Press to open a PR preview.
  3. Press to get a list of available actions on PR(Approve, Checkout, View Diff, etc..)
  4. Jump to the repository or PR in the browser if you need full context.

Why Wrap tea Instead of Re-implementing the API?

Because Forgejo’s REST API is already covered nicely by the tea CLI, which handles authentication and context selection. That means snacks-tea.nvim stays super lightweight — no token management, no custom HTTP code.

Current Status

For existing PR, plugin handles:

  • View Diff (d) - Open a file-by-file diff viewer with navigation
  • Checkout (c) - tea pr checkout <number>
  • Approve (A) - tea pr approve <number>
  • Request Changes - tea pr reject <number>
  • Comment (a) - tea pr comment <number>
  • Merge - tea pr merge <number>
  • Close (x) - tea pr close <number>
  • Reopen (o) - tea pr reopen <number>

Also you can create new PR:

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Closing Thoughts

This project is heavily inspired by Folke’s work on snacks.nvim. The goal isn’t to reinvent the wheel — it’s to extend that same great UX to people who self-host on Forgejo.

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