8 Vim Plugins To Explode Productivity
Vim is a great tool to use on Linux. Vim makes working in Linux fast and efficient. If you don’t know vim, check out tutorial how to use vim.
Vim has great community support and tons of plugins which makes it an awesome tool to use. I will go over few of the essential plugins which I think everyone should have. These plugins are by no means the complete list.
Ctrlp: Ctrlp is a great plugin to access and find files. Once you are in vim, this plugin helps you access files both in directory and sub directories. You can also access the files which you have opened in the past. The plugin supports both fuzzy logic and regexp to find files.
NerdTree: Nerdtree gives you windows style file explorer functionality in Vim. One can debate that you don’t need Nerdtree if you have Ctrlp installed. But i find both these plugins to be useful.
Vim-Searchindex: vim-searchindex is small plugin but very useful. When you search, it displays how many times a search pattern appears and also shows the index of pattern as we move the cursor to next or previous search pattern.
Vim-Visual-Star-Search: This plugin makes it super easy to search text containing special characters. Once installed, highlight the text in visual mode and then press * to go next and # to go back to previous search pattern.
Vim-Surround: Great plugin for coders. Especially useful for editing html files. This plugin matches quotes, brackets, parenthesis etc.
Dirdiff.vim: If you know vimdiff , you would absolutely love this plugin. This plugin helps diff two directories with nice vim interface. For each file, It displays file differences side by side as we see in vimdiff.
Vim-Colors-Solarized: Great vim plugin with many vim color schemes to choose from.
Conclusion: As I said in the beginning, this is not a complete list of vim plugins. But in this post, I have tried to introduce some of the not so common plugins which i find should be part of every vim user’s arsenal. Please let me know in comments if you have any suggestions.