How to Remove a Stubborn Snap

11 Jul, 2026

I decided to remove neovim due to their over reliance with using LLMs (note vim is worse). There are some bugs in a release of neovim that caused files to get deleted.

This TIL is how to to remove a snap. I got the following error:

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> sudo snap remove --purge nvim                                                                                                          
error: cannot perform the following tasks:                                                                                                                                              
- Remove data for snap "nvim" (4820) (failed to remove snap "nvim" base directory: remove /home/christopher/snap/nvim: directory not empty) 

This is a known bug but the work around is to just delete the directory:

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> sudo rm -r /home/christopher/snap/nvim
> sudo snap snap remove --purge nvim

Now I just need to find a new editor…

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