Vim essentials

Here is a list of Vim scripts I picked up in the past few years that I find very useful. All of them can be found as submodules in my dotvim repo.

I am attaching my own rating to the scripts, but these aren’t really objective. They are merely an indication how much I ended up using the scripts. For example, vim-fugitive is so damn powerful it deserves a sixth star, but I just prefer to use git from the command line rather than from Vim.

Tim Pope’s scripts, in order of usefulness:

  • pathogen is the single most useful plug-in for Vim! ★★★★★
  • repeat for repeating plug-in maps ★★★★★
  • sensible is a set of very useful defaults ★★★★★
  • sleuth sets shiftwidth and expandtab in a smart way ★★★★★
  • abolish for abbreviation, substitution & correction ★★★★☆
  • commentary to comment stuff out ★★★★☆
  • haml for haml, sass, and SCSS ★★★★☆
  • liquid for liquid runtime files with jekyll enhancements ★★★☆☆
  • markdown for markdown runtime files ★★★☆☆
  • surround makes quoting/parenthesizing simpler ★★☆☆☆
  • fugitive is “a git wrapper so awesome, it should be illegal” ★★☆☆☆
  • speeddating makes date/time manipulation easier ★☆☆☆☆
  • unimpaired are complementary pairs of mappings ★☆☆☆☆
  • pyflakes (my fork) enables PyFlakes checking for Python files ★★★★★
  • jedi enables jedi’s auto-completion for Python files ★★★★☆

Others that I’ve tried:

  • coffee-script for those .coffee files ★★★★★
  • golang is the official Go Vim script ★★★★★
  • less is the Vim syntax file for LESS ★★★★★
  • css3-syntax adds CSS3 syntax support to Vim’s built-in syntax/css.vim ★★★★☆
  • markdown-folding allows folding markdown documents by section ★★★★☆
  • colors-solarized is a “precision” colour scheme “for machines and people” ★★☆☆☆
  • css-color is a nice concept, but I couldn’t get it to work ☆☆☆☆☆

Check out my dotvim repo or this screencast by Tim Pope for tips on how to put them all together.