Show HN: Vim Awesome – Vim plugins | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Vim Awesome – Vim plugins

vimawesome.com

222 pointsdivad1252 comments

56 of them are Tim Pope...damn that guy is prolific

Shougo is quite prolific as well

This is exactly the kind of visually appealing and easily navigable Vim plugin directory I've been searching for ever since I started using it last year. Thank you for sharing, this is fantastic!

Thank you! Wanting such a thing is why we built it. :)

+1. Thank you for the effort you put in.

I guess it's good that my Vundles are basically the top 10. Ha!

This looks awesome! Thanks so much for this. I have a sort of unrelated question that I'd like to ask, since you implemented this so well. On one of my current side projects, I was also trying to implement scrolling by j/k, but couldn't find a nice way to do it. Could you explain how you managed to do it? I have something that works, but it's really jerky, and doesn't accelerate properly like yours does. Thanks again for this awesome site!

Hi! Glad you like the j/k scrolling.

All it is is a call to `window.scrollTo()` with some logic to determine the position of the element we want to scroll to. See [1] for the code of the actual function that does the scrolling. Is there acceleration? There doesn't seem to be on Chrome for Mac. :/

Oh, if you meant the little arrow ("»") that slides to the right on focus of a plugin, that's just the CSS 3 transition `all 0.1s ease-out` applied to a changing `left` and `opacity`. See [2] for code.

Thanks for checking out the site!

[1]: https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/blob/13d576664aa88fe0... [2]: https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/blob/13d576664aa88fe0...

Not that it matters but I think this is built using Reactjs.

It does, if you consider that spicyj worked on this and that he's a core React contributor =).

In fact, this was the first React project that he worked on -- he rewrote our old angular app within a week of when React first came out, and had been hooked since.

Cool! Does he have plans to write an article about his experience writing this in React? That would be an interesting read, especially since it's open source.

"From Across the Universe", indeed: an emacs mode seems to have slipped in by accident: http://vimawesome.com/plugin/haskell-mode

This is pretty cool. However, clicking on a plugin takes you to [1] (for example). Clicking on the header there takes you to [2]. This is probably not the intended behaviour.

[1]: http://vimawesome.com/plugin/vim-airline-sad-beautiful-tragi... [2]: http://vimawesome.com/plugin/plugin/vim-airline-sad-beautifu...

Oops, that's definitely a bug! Issue raised: https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/issues/16

Thanks for finding this.

This is one of the best looking Vim ressource I stumbled upon so far! Finally a little care for something else than raw information. My eyes thank you, creators of vimawesome.

Thank you! The color scheme used is Solarized, courtesy of Ethan Schoonover: http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized

I've tried switching from pathogen to Vundle a couple of times and given up when I couldn't figure out how to get it to find a few of my old plugins. This site gives me the Vundle commands that work. Finally! What a great idea - scanning github for .vimrc's and extracting what folks have done with them! You've advanced the platform with this contribution.

This is awesome indeed!

I've just thought of two features that would make it even more awesome. Every plugin could have the following two lists:

1. Known to be incompatible with

2. Frequently installed together with

The first list would have to be user-edited, but the second one could theoretically be determined by searching github.

Thanks, these are great suggestions! Added two issues:

1. https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/issues/40

2. https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/issues/39

Neat idea, but that website needs some serious contrast. Almost unreadable when scaled.

That’s solarized for you… (I never could stand it).

I need contrast in the colors so I can turn down contrast and brightness in the monitor.

FWIW, Vundle doesn't use :BundleInstall anymore, it's :PluginInstall. Similarly it's Plugin ".../..." instead of Bundle ".../..."

Indeed -- https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/pull/17

Thanks for pointing this out to us. Will merge when I get home.

You're most welcome. Sorry for not creating a pull request myself, but I was dead tired last night.

Also, the new Plugin command doesn't support double quoted string arguments, it gets parsed as a trailing comment. I discovered this after I s//'d my Bundle "<plugin>" lines to Plugin "<plugin>" and received 'Argument required' errors. The fix was to use single quote strings, i.e. Plugin '<plugin>'

I wrote this how do I categorize this? http://vimawesome.com/plugin/numbers-vim

Just click the edit button next to "uncategorized", and select a category. You can edit and add tags as well if you'd like.

Numbers is one of my favourite Vim plugins! Looks like you are the author. Thank you so much for writing it!

Very nice. Suggestion: in the search box, pushState only onBlur (so it doesn't spam history, forcing you to hit. the. back. button. through. Every. Character.)

Great. cool. awesome.

so we don't need muck with plug-in help text to read the doc. we can read it here

Awesome work, as a Vim user and plugin maintainer I loved it.

Love it, found ctrlp thanks too it. What a great plugin

This is really awesome. And the search bar works well!

only thing I don't like is that all installation instructions seem to assume you are running vim from a *nix system.

Looks pretty cool. One comment though: when clicking through the categories on the left, I see "x [number]" next to some of the tags, but that number doesn't seem to match the number of plugins that will actually be shown if you click on it.

Example: Completion->'deliminators x 3' shows three yellowish plugins, and then three differently colors plugins. What is the significance of the colors?

Example: Other->'manager x 3' shows no results.

Hi! Thank you for checking this out!

The reason for the mis-match between # of plugins and tags count is the tags count only counts plugins with that tag in the category the tag is nested under. I agree this is quite confusing, and should just make the two views consistent. I'll add an issue to GitHub about it.

Each category has a distinct color.

> Other->'manager x 3' shows no results

Oh, we hide plugin mangers right now, so no results are shown. :( Will fix this to be nicer, thanks.

awesome

Right, because stars on github are a perfect indication that a plugin will work for me.

Where is it stated that it's a perfect metric for plugin relevancy?

Alternatively, what would be a better metric. Any ideas?

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script_search_results.php?keyword...

So we're just trading one measure of popularity with another?

It's the one that is used on that awesome site.

A better metric is actually trying all the alternatives.

You're right that GitHub stars probably isn't the best metric of how good a plugin is. We try to use a more unbiased metric of relative # of actual users, and this we get by scraping dotfiles repos on GitHub, looking for references to Vim plugins. That's shown as the # users count to the left of stars on GitHub. It's also not perfect, but it's a useful source of relative usage statistics.

My point is two-fold:

1. You can't have real and complete usage statistics so those metrics are at best meaningless and at worst misleading. Also, something being popular doesn't mean that it will fit one's workflow and needs.

2. Choosing a tool because of its perceived (through meaningless/misleading numbers) is not really the smarter way to build-up one's config.

I just can't get excited about vim plugins (no matter how good they are, no matter how much I love vi/vim - and no disrespect to their authors). I can imagine how they could increase my productivity (to some extent) but...

I'm old school, I work happily with vi, many of the customers I dealt with going back to the mid-90s never gave me a choice. SunOS 4.1.3U5 (ugh). AIX 3. Heady days of Solaris 2.5. Bog standard vi. vim is a bonus, but I'm far from lost when it's just vi. I love macros, but I can still get stuff done if they aren't available. If there's no vi then I'm not lost either, I can work around stuff with awk/sed/etc.

Fundamentally I don't want to have to ever install a bunch of stuff in multiple places to create a common environment for myself. That's a big problem that hasn't been solved yet. I just want it to be the same everywhere, which is why I don't rely on zsh or even ksh, and I just go for the bare minimum.

I've been to too many customers to know that not being able to do stuff within someone else's environment is really not a good thing. I've seen people escorted off customer sites because they've been ineffectual.

But, the biggest takeway is that I've seen too many new employees/interns that are lost without their expected favoured environment, and it's not getting better. vim plugins aside, there's a growing lack of adaptability.

This site could implement an ACL though github accounts and provide centralized, recipe-like plugin and *rc file mashups like alias.sh with an ifttt.com twist.

Eh, I use a large number of the top plugins in the OP, but I've never had any trouble dropping back to "vanilla" vi/m in ssh shells or whatever. It's just a matter of convenience; there's nothing there that's so totally transformational that you won't be able to use vim without it.

> If there's no vi

How often are you in a situation where there's no vi!?

Occasionally, usually over zealous stripping back of machines in very controlled environments[1].

1. I don't do much work with these kinds of customers any more as I chose not to go for security clearance (on purpose, as this is a convenient way of avoiding these kinds of customers).

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