In Neovim, the . character repeats "the most recent action"; however, this is not always respected by plugin actions. Here we will explore how to build dot-repeat support directly into your plugin, bypassing the requirement of dependencies like repeat.vim.
When some buffer-modifying action is performed, Neovim implicitly remembers the operator (e.g. d), motion (e.g. iw), and some other miscellaneous information. When the dot-repeat command is called, Neovim repeats that operator-motion combination. For example, if we type ci"text<Esc>, then we replace the inner contents of some double quotes with text, i.e. "hello world" → "text". Dot-repeating from here will do the same, i.e. "more samples" → "text".