Making Vim Awesome

I guess the best way to say goodbye to vim would be to give a nice list of the things that I found handy in vim. As always with customizable tools like this, there is no definitive answer to how to make vim awesome. I would advise you to look at some basic vimrc settings and browse through vim awesome to find the things that make your vim workflow work best for you!

General recommendations

For those who are still getting familiar with vim, the interactive vim tutorial is a good place to get started with the basic commands.

• For general recommendation on the vimrc file, checkout the vim wiki page.
• For a list of commonly used plugins, see vim awesome.
• For in depth tutorials on popular vim plugins and vim scripting, check out Vim cast

Configuring Vim

As my brother said:

Vim is not just a program, it is a standard to which people compare what one could expect out of their text editors

So vim is not the “Real men use h-j-k-l” elitist BS that some people like to say, but what is possible in the text editor: Custom key-mapping, macros, block editing, keystroke recording… etc. The true power of vim is not in what you get directly out of the box, but what is potentially possible by the vim configuration settings via the ~/.vimrc file. In addition to the powerful engines already given to you by vim (regex, syntax/file-type awareness…etc.), the configuration is programmable, so that you could shape vim to suit your own specific needs.

My vimrc settings

Here is the list of options that I have activated to improve the overall typing experience. If you are highly into text based stuff, I highly recommend checking out some of the options (and related) below to find what works the best for you!

Indention settings

Indention is the simplest way of keeping maintaining appearance in text files, so might as well life easier

set tabstop=3       "" Setting indention width
set shiftwidth=3
set expandtab       "" Replacing tab with spaces
set smarttab        "" Use tab instead of spaces
set autoindent      "" Indenting to current indention levle on new line input

Wild card settings

Finding files should be left to the computer, not the user. Open files with command line like auto complete

set wildmenu                "" Enable wild card
set wildmode=longest,full   "" Set to autocomplete to the longest prefix
set wildignore+=*.a,*.o     "" Setting to ignore non-textbased extensions
set wildignore+=*.bmp,*.gif,*.ico,*.jpg,*.png
set wildignore+=.DS_Store,.git,.hg,.svn
set wildignore+=*~,*.swp,*.tmp

Search settings

Settings I found when I just into vim, molded my workflow around them…

set showmatch   "" Automatically move cursor to next results position
set hlsearch    "" Highlight search results
set incsearch
set ignorecase  "" Ignore upper/lower-case different when searching all under-case
set smartcase   "" Case-dependent search when search query includes uppercase or regex

Line number

Let vim display the line number.

set number            "" Display linenumber
set relativenumber    "" Show linenumber relative tu cursor
set numberwidth=4     "" Width of numberline column

Miscellaneous settings

Other settings

set showcmd                   "" Show input commands at bottom of screen
set backspace=2               "" Allow backspace across new-line
set formatoptions=c,q,r,t
set ruler                     "" Display cursor position
set background=dark           "" Choose color scheme for dark background
set mouse=a                   "" Enable mouse interaction
set shell=zsh\ --login        "" Set shell command environment to match regular terminal

Note that syntax highlighting would require filetype on, but we need to set up the plugin manager first.

The Essential Plugins

Though I say that vim configuration, I haven’t actually written any vim scripts myself, you could find a nice tutorial here though. What I do use are the plugins that are already written by others and do minor settings to make it look better. For a nice list of available and actively maintained plugins, check out vim awesome.

The following plugins listed below is what I consider to be essential in my workflow, and editing in vim simply wouldn’t be the same without.

Vundle - the package manager

A package manager that is simple to use and maintain. To use it add the following lines to vimrc

set nocompatible
filetype off
set rtp+=~/.vim/bundle/Vundle.vim
call vundle#begin()

Plugin 'gmarik/Vundle.vim'
""" Add pacakges like [github_user]/[repository name]
call vundle#end()
filetype on
filetype plugin on
filetype indent on

The lines that need to be added to vim could be directly found on vimawesome.

Vim Airline - the informative interface

During editing, you might want to get some useful information about your editing conditions, like your operation mode, the path of the file you are editing, the tabs you have opened, the git branch, the cursor position… etc.

While all of this information is available by the vim command line, this package makes is possible to choose the information you are typically interested and display it in a consistence and pretty way!

To use add Plugin 'bling/air-line' to the plugin lines, for the better fonts, you might want to install the powerline fonts to you fonts (system or otherwise).

Ultisnip - Programmable snippet insertion

In coding there are typically patterns that will occur over and over again (Class declaration, tags, loops and ifs, comment blocks…) Snippets allow you to add inputs by simple inputs and string substitution so that you don’t need to key class names multiple times. What’s more, the output could be programmable by python to change based on your input in various sections!

To use add Plugin 'SirVer/ultisnips' to the plugins lines. See the GitHub page Readme.md for examples on programmable snippets!

My little test script was to make a separator comment what is easy to type! (For on how this is achieved, see my GitHub repository)

//----- This is a seperator -------------------------------------------
dummy_code = a ;

//----- This is also seperator, with more test ------------------------
dummy_code = b ;

This is the feature that I miss the most about vim when migrating to atom, The snippet system in atom simply isn’t mature enough, and In my nearly two years in vim I have accumulated some snippets that is a bit annoying to port into atom’s cson format.

The Nice plugins

The following are packages that ones that are not commonly used in everyday workflow, But is nice to have around.

Tabular - Aligning on characters

In the code I’m helping to maintain, there are usually long sections of declaration and assignment, and it helps with my sanity if I could align my code by the = operator or other aspects strings in the code!

Add the line Plugin 'godlygeek/tabular' to use this plugin, and check out the vim cast video to see how to use it!

NerdTree - Displaying the directory structure

Since vim is command line based and a lot of the work flow would be based around paths, it would be nice that the user could get a display of the directory structure if ever needed to be referenced. Since my discovery of the tree command, this task is typically managed via command line. But I do like my some interface open when I work.

YouCompleteMe - Advance auto-completion system

This is a syntax aware, content aware, fuzzy matching auto-completion system. This plugin is a bit hard to recommend: it’s heavy, sluggish with large files, and has a lot of dependencies if you want it to work with self-defined C++ functions. But it works well with a number of other plugins (Ultisnip via supertab), and simply works with most of the stuff I expect from an auto-completions system.

Well, that is that. Since vim will survive in my main program as a system file editor, most of the heavier plugins will be disabled (ultisnip and YouCompleteMe). If you want to use vim as your primary text editor for general purpose text related tasks, I highly recommend checking out the settings that I have used above!