Hello!
A while back I wrote a post asking for who knows Vim on Indiehackers
I got a lot of responses and useful advice.
Today I started to configure my .vimrc and wanted to open this question up to the community:
What are your favorite plugins for configuring Vim?
Thanks for your help. The ocean 🌊 of Vim plugins out there can be quite a lot to take in. I have found some essential plugins such as NerdTree and the palenight theme, but I was wondering what other great plugins were out there.
Feel free to share in the comments below ⬇
Top comments (10)
For me the must-haves are:
To manage your plugins, vim-plug.
Outside of the big ones above there are a few that just make the whole vim experience a little nicer in my opinion, all of them made by Tim Pope:
:Renameand:Deletedo/endkeywordsNerdTreeis nice, but in Neovim there is an inbuilt Terminal plugin, just like modern IDEs such as VSCode.Hence I can start Neovim in Terminal in Neovim in Terminal in Neovim in Terminal in Neovim in Terminal in...
Oh great what a recursion.
I disagree - NERDTree is missing the point of Vim. The Vim world is a bit split between people who want to make it look like a traditional tab-based editor and people who don't.
And the terminal isn't a great reason to advocate for Neovim since it's not really that useful to most people (Vim is already in the terminal and can read and write to it fine) and a terminal has been in regular Vim since early version 8 sometime.
This is true, and the extensibility of tabs and plugins under a TUI is what makes Vim itself unique. I can simply guess that the purpose of NERDTree is to introduce Vim for those who are already familiar with modern GUI-based IDEs, as they usually put the File/Project/Directory Explorer on the left, which some may find it easier to navigate rather than bashing on a bunch of
lsor:lscommands.The reason I put the Neovim's Terminal (and since I know that the feature is coming to Vim 8 as well) is simply to pull out a recursion joke. So now behold, Vim is now the world's second recursible text editor^.
^So does Emacs, at least on the GNU/Linux world
Thanks, I've heard of Neovim before. I will be sure to give it a try.
My favorite plugins are the ones that make native features more intuitive.
vimhas some cool stuff builtin, but sometimes they are so difficult to use it's not even funny.It adds one command to manage the file of your current session.
Enhances the
fandtmoves, by providing you with hints to move faster across a line.And speaking of moves. This one is in the same spirit, but it works across the visible portions of the window.
Makes it easier to toggle the built-in terminal. Just that.
To maximize a window. I mostly use this with nuake, because sometimes I need the terminal to take the whole screen.
Modifies some of the behaviors of the quickfix window. To make it nicer.
This one also works with the quickfix window. It makes it modifiable in a more "intuitive" way. It makes big updates (like find and replace across a project) so much easier.
Goyo (made by the creator of Vim Plug, my favorite Vim plugin manager) is amazing when you want distraction-free writing.
For me these are a must:
• Vim COC
• FZF
• Editorconfig
• Polyglot
• NERD Commenter
Some other that I personally use are
Vim-Surround,Vim-Repeat,Vim-Autoclose,Emmet,Tabular,Supertab,Wordmotion,Lightline,Vim-GitgutterandGrubox.I'm a huge fan of
airlineandfugitive, with few remapsfugitivecan be very very powerful.YCM and CoC are also great for code completion.
CoC.vim and its ecosystem (coc-explorer, coc-git etc) really took vim/neovim to another level that you can do everything in terminal. A must have IMHO.