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jherdman

Here are some I find invaluable:

* FZF. Perhaps the best fuzzy finder for Vim https://github.com/junegunn/fzf/

* ALE. Asynchronous Linting Engine, totally awesome. https://github.com/w0rp/ale

* Polyglot. A "best of" language pack. https://github.com/sheerun/vim-polyglot

* Plug. IMHO the best plugin manager going https://github.com/junegunn/vim-plug.

* Fugitive. The best git wrapper there is https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive

* vim-test. A plugin that helps you run tests from inside of Vim. https://github.com/janko-m/vim-test

Outside of that, switch to NeoVim if you haven't already (https://neovim.io/). Or give Oni a chance, it looks really promising (https://www.onivim.io/).

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While I appreciate your comment, we can already guess that you believe the packages you have chosen to be “the best” at their job. Without further narration (and I’ve only singled you out due to being the topmost comment), comment sections like this have a tendency to become a dumping ground for vimrc snippets.

Could you expand on why? Personally I’d be particularly interested on your thoughts about vim-plug, as I use pathogen currently and I seems to do everything I need.

- You can update all the plugins with PlugUpdate; furthermore, they are updated in parallel.

- You can lazy load plugins

- You can execute commands after a plugin update (e.g. building the new binary for youcompleteme)

Those are the major points I think.

Lots of people like plugin managers. I prefer to use "git clone" and "stow". Much less magical, and I feel I have a better understanding of what's going on with my configuration.

I have a plugin manager that can help you with that!

Seriously, isn't part of the problem that vim by default looks for all plugins in one directory? Tim Pope's Pathogen does the minimum here and lets each plugin have its own directory (which translates to git repo). You're responsible for going to each directory and updating them.

Git submodules handle that for me, also allows me to easily rollback.

I'm doing that too. I clone into "~/.config/nvim/stow/", then stow figures out how to put all that stuff into the proper places. Occasionally there is a conflict, but that is usually for files that I don't want anyway, like "build" or "LICENSE".

Plugin managers are also nice because you can maintain a list of plugins right in your vimrc. Not the biggest win in the world if you are fine managing your plugins via a shell script, but it's a win to many.

My favourite thing about vim-plug is its `:PlugDiff` command which, after running `:PlugUpdate` will load all the new commits in an explorable vim buffer, so you can see exactly what changed and even easily see code changes.

Those were my favourite neovim plugins as well. Oni is still a bit rough around the edges, and rendering is a little bit slow at times, at least on my machine.

I now use doom-emacs [1] and haven't looked back.

[1] https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs

Do you know how doom-emacs compares to spacemacs?

More opinionated, a little more bare-metal, a lot worse bus factor.

All of those things are true!

Overall, it's a solid alternative to Spacemacs that not enough people know about.

Spacemacs markets itself much better and I tried it first, but found it to be bloated to be point that it noticeably impacted performance. E.g. start-up time was 10+ seconds; ~2s with doom (and doom doesn't feel any less feature-complete).

As for the bus factor, doom has the maturity of a 4-year-old project; it won't just fall apart on you. It is mostly a one-man show, but Henrik is still very active and super quick to respond to issues.

What is the downside of using vim packs in contrast to vim plugins ? I just do cd ~/.vim/pack/start and from there I git clone the repos and that's it... In my case I usually work in a container and have different packs depending if I'm doing stuff with programming in rust or go or just do configuration management. I really loved the asynchronous functionality in vim8, any nice plugins that take advantage of it? For now I only use it to trigger cargo test and let finish at some point later on: https://github.com/sebosp/linuxtweaks/blob/develop/vimrc#L14...

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