In this post, I will talk about top vim plugins which everyone should have.
Nerdtree Nerdtree is a file explorer for the vim editor. Once you have nerdtree installed, it is easy to navigate through sub directories and files.
Ctrlp Ctrlp is a fuzzy file finder. Ctrlp is a great utility to find files in a current directory and sub directories. You can use find files based on fuzzy logic or vim's regular expressions. With Ctrlp, you don't have to get out of vim. Ctrlp also keeps track of previously opened files.
Vim-surround Surround.vim is all about "surroundings": parentheses, brackets, quotes, XML tags, and more. The plugin provides mappings to easily delete, change and add such surroundings in pairs.
Vim-foldsearch This plugin is must have plugin if you deal with large files. It makes searching through files very effective. When you search a word or pattern using vim-foldsearch, it folds the lines which don't have pattern matched and only show the lines with patterns.
Vim-visual-star-search This is small plugin but very useful. This allows you to select some text using Vim's visual mode and then hit *
and # to search for it elsewhere in the file. For example, hit V, select a strange sequence of characters like "$! $!", and hit star. You'll find all other runs of "$! $!" in the file.
Vim-colors-solarized Great plugin to select from pre-configured color schemes.
Vim rename multiple Files There are multiple plugins to do this. Please checkout the above post to know more about these plugins.
Top comments (2)
I probably make no secret that I don't like NERDTree. Well, I mean, I don't hate it, but I do think it's unnecessary. Vim has a bunch of ways of opening files, built-in and netrw, and NERDTree doesn't gel well with Vim's windows/buffers system.
But if you suggest people use CtrlP, then why would you need NERDTree? Assuming you use NERDTree for something that you can't do with CtrlP, what is it?
Well, i agree Ctrlp is enough to navigate through files and directories. I use Ctrlp most of the times but sometimes I need to look through the whole directory structure in one window. Ultimately it depends upon each individual's comfort level thats why I suggested both.