Show HN: A workshop on how to use Vim plugins | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A workshop on how to use Vim plugins

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94 pointsz1mm32m4n22 comments

This guide introduces some neat plugins. However one plugin that is widely useful but missing from this guide is YouCompleteMe [0] which gives you smart, general-purpose, automatic, token-based autocomplete.

[0] http://valloric.github.io/YouCompleteMe/

There also should be a patch to get 24 bit color support in Vim if you use terminals which support it like Konsole. But it's not in the mainline code:

https://bitbucket.org/ZyX_I/vim/branch/default?head=bcdcd815...

I didn't try it yet, but it should be possible to make something like Gotham theme to work in it: https://github.com/whatyouhide/vim-gotham

Am I the only one who prefers to use Vim bare and just have a terminal open in another tab/window? For some reason having all these plugins weighs me down in a spiritual way, where the benefits of being able to edit a bit of text or open the right file more quickly get drowned out by these extra objects on my desk I have to keep track of.

Some plugins really increase your productivity. For instance CtrlP or Syntastic. But I agree that sometimes it feels overwhelming to have all those things enabled, and sometimes not even being sure what they do and how to use them.

Common mistake for new vim users - include many cool plugins and forget to read manuals. Before I did the same too - just used single of just few plugin features. Result - multiple plugins which are covering each other features.

My 2 cents - read full plugin manual just after you install it.

Out of the plugins listed there the most useful ones that actually save me time are CtrlP and Syntastic.

Syntastic is useful because it can give (visual) feedback on exactly which lines have warnings/errors a lot faster than recompiling the project. Also I find it easier to use than :make and :cope.

You can setup CtrlP to take its file list directly from git ls-files: very convenient for working with largish projects where files are in subdirs. And if you press Ctrl-t it opens the file in a new tab instead of replacing the currently open one (YMMV).

Depending on the language(s) you use there are other plugins that might be useful, and you can keep using the terminal as a separate app, and for specific operations (like git commit/grep and such). In fact for a long time I was launching Vim from a terminal (with tabs), but I found out that I had dozens of Vim processes running in the background by the end of the day. So I switched to using GVim + separate terminal app now.

If you integrate CtrlP with The Silver Searcher you get a really nice speedup as well.

:Ggrep from vim-fugitive is plenty fast, didn't need to try other search tools yet but will keep in mind if it becomes slow.

I agree. The only one I rely on is Command-T (fuzzer) which I simply would not be without. The file navigation in that thing is a fantastic.

No, you're not. I recently deleted all my Vim plugins from my .vim. The only ones I've occasionally missed are surround.vim and a commenting plugin.

Integrating tools to Vim is its Achilles heel. In particular, there's no reasonable debugger integration. And interaction with long running processes is difficult.

I use vim, cgdb and tig (for git) inside tmux. With cscope and ctags for code navigation, this gives me all the "IDE" features I need without any clumsy plugins.

Some plugins are fairly transparent (eg, ocp-indent for OCaml improves indentation but doesn't get in your way). Others are great productivity boosters. I can't imagine working without syntastic, and fugitive+git-gutter are great productivity boosters.

It is however easy to get overboard and install a great many plugins you don't really need.

I love

https://github.com/techlivezheng/vim-plugin-minibufexpl

to see each buffer in a tab, plus minimum configuration to move between tabs with CTRL-PAGEUP/DOWN. Feels like switching tabs in a browser and it's easier to see which files you have open

    " Switch buffers
    " note that I must first define what is <C-PageUp> for rxvt
    " http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin-xfree/2006-07/msg00011.html
    nmap    <ESC>[5^    <C-PageUp>
    nmap    <ESC>[6^    <C-PageDown>
    nnoremap <silent> <C-PageDown> :bnext<CR>
    nnoremap <silent> <C-PageUp> :bprevious<CR>

You might want to give Bufstop a try, it solves a lot of problems buffer switchers have and it's much more customizable.

https://github.com/mihaifm/bufstop

I've also created Vimpanel (since we're talking about Vim as an IDE)

https://github.com/mihaifm/vimpanel

I use tmux rather than terminal tabs, but aside that I'm the same as you in that I never bother with vim plugins.

Though a large part of the reason is because I'm constantly switching between different servers so it's one less config I need to synchronise (and being reliant on plugins that aren't present on half the systems you manage quickly becomes less productive than never using those plugins to begin with).

When I go to a construction site, I only bring a hammer. I feel a screw driver would weigh me down spiritually. Sure, it could be useful, but I sometimes show up at construction sites and all they have is a hammer. Keeping a toolbox of tools, is just more stuff that I have to keep track of.

I think it's a bit unfair to call vim and all the standard command-line tools in a typical linux distro "a hammer." There is a hell of a lot you can do before you begin to customize them.

Nope. I use a bare vim as well. Or should I say, the vim that is installed by my package manager. It includes a lot of plugins in the system runtime path but those are mainly file format and syntax plugins.

I used to use a really tricked out vim with crazy stuff like neocomplete and unite.vim. Then for a while I used plain old vi on FreeBSD (aka nvi). After switching back to arch linux I decided to use bare vim since nvi still has some annoying bugs.

So much of the stuff people write plugins to do can be done more easily and simply with macros and/or the ! or = commands.

What are your thoughts on https://github.com/spf13/spf13-vim ? It might make a good link for in the "Now that I'm a plugin master, I want to..." end section.

This was part of a talk series at Carnegie Mellon. If you're interested, the rest of the talks can be found here:

http://cmucc.org/talks/

Why airline instead of powerline?

Pure VimL, no external dependencies.

Most of my co-worker using Vim as their primary editor happens to be really good at their job. (Of course I wouldn't say that using Vim 'means' you're a good developers!)

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