Vim Plugins

Last updated: Thu Aug 10 2023

I use quite a few vim plugins, but most of them are relatively simple editing plugins that introduce new text objects or commands. I shy away from more complicated plugins that try to turn vim into a fully-featured IDE. vim should be focused on text editing! If I want an IDE, I’ll use an IDE… with the vim mode enabled 😉

Table of Contents

vim-plug

I use vim-plug for plugin installation and management. Arguably, I don’t even need a plugin manager, but vim-plug is about as simple as can be.

sensible.vim

sensible.vim sets a bunch of options that “everyone can agree on.” It’s less useful for neovim, where many of these are actually the defaults, but it doesn’t hurt to include it.

Visual Line Remap

I almost always want to navigate up and down visual lines, respecting line wrapping, instead of logical lines. Hence, I remap the default j and k to their visual line equivalents:

nmap j gj
nmap k gk

Send Yanks to Clipboard

I’ve always found vim’s register system a hassle; I use Raycast for my clipboard history needs, but that only works if vim is yanking to the clipboard. Luckily, putting all yanks into the clipboard is easy:

set clipboard+=unnamedplus

Highlighted Yanks

When yanking, especially with text objects, I want the yanked text to be highlighted briefly to make sure I actually yanked the right thing. In neovim, that can be done with this function:

augroup highlight_yank
    autocmd!
    autocmd TextYankPost * silent! lua vim.highlight.on_yank { higroup="IncSearch", timeout=250 }
augroup END

commentary.vim

commentary.vim provides the gc action to comment or uncomment a line, supporting most common programming languages.

surround.vim

surround.vim provides actions for working with “surroundings” like parentheses and quotation marks. ys adds a surrounding pair, cs changes a surrounding pair, and ds deletes a surrounding pair.

This is useful when, for instance, I want to change a bare JavaScript string, surrounded by quotation marks, into an interpolated string, surrounded by backticks. It can also be useful to delete nested HTML tags with dst.

CamelCaseMotion

Curiously, neither vim itself nor targets.vim provides a text object or text motion for camel-case or snake-case words, which are omnipresent in most programming languages. CamelCaseMotion fixes that with the introduction of \w for camel-case and snake-case words.

vim-swap

vim-swap provides new commands, g< and g>, for moving around arguments to C-style functions, which doesn’t often come up but is a nice quality-of-life improvement when it does.

speeddating.vim

vim has <C-a> and <C-x> for numeric increment and decrement, but they don’t play well with dates formatted like YYYY-MM-DD; they interpret the months and days as negative numbers. speeddating.vim fixes them to respect date formatting.

repeat.vim

repeat.vim fixes the . repeat command for some of the previous plugins, notably surround.vim and speeddating.vim.

supertab

supertab is a simple plugin that enables <Tab> for vim’s built-in autocomplete instead of the default keybinding, which I never remember anyway.

vim-tmux-navigator

I’m a heavy tmux user on the command line, and vim-tmux-navigator makes vim behave better with tmux. In particular, it adds <C-h>, <C-j>, <C-k>, and <C-l> bindings to navigate between tmux panes and vim splits without getting trapped.