2021-11-05
Having inducted you, in my previous post, into the mystical art of using Vim, I will now share with you ten of the plugins that I find useful. I won't give instructions about how to actually set them up, beyond saying that if you follow the links then the repository READMEs all have all the documentation you need for a quickstart. I make no claim to be by any means a Vim expert, and for each of them there may well be superior alternatives (this becomes especially likely with the passage of time), but these are all tools I have found helpful.
Now before installing any plugins, it might be helpful to have a plugin manager: I use vim-plug.
The first plugin I think I ever installed was Tim Pope's vim-sensible, because he says "If you're new to Vim, you can install this as a starting point, rather than copying some random vimrc you found", and I thought he probably knew what he was talking about.
I tried a few different colour schemes, and gruvbox is easily my favourite.
As well as finding a colour scheme you like, you should make the status-line look pretty: vim-airline adds several useful titbits of data in satisfyingly stylish form. And you can pick a theme -- I like 'minimalist'.
As you begin using Vim, and develop a personal configuration that
suits your taste, you'll occasionally find that in order to have the
necessary permissions to edit a file, you have to open it with
sudo. And rather jarringly you suddenly have to operate without
your carefully chosen colour-scheme and all your favourite plugins,
and simply make do with the system defaults. Unless of course you
have installed suda.vim,
which allows you to edit a file with root privileges without running
the whole session that way.
When you're using Vim to edit code, it can helpfully 'fold' away the body of a function or class. For Python, SimpylFold makes sure the folding is syntactically correct.
It's also helpful to be able to comment out a line with the same command, regardless of whether the code you're editing is Python or Javascript or Vimscript or whatever. Tim Pope's vim-commentary does this nicely.
For immediate linting and syntax checking, ALE is great.
Another helpful code editing tool is tagbar, which gives a list of all the variables, functions, and classes defined in your file.
With NERDTree you can then have a file system explorer in your Vim editor, giving you a fairly decent development environment.
Tagbar and NERDTree are great, but they both involve adding windows which can leave your screen space feeling a little squeezed. I use winresizer to make resizing windows nice and easy.
As a final bonus, and very pleasing to the eye, vim-css-color helpfully shows you what colour those impenetrable hex codes represent.
And if there are any vital vim plugins that I've missed, let me know!