Tooling

Vim Plugins that Cure Depression 🔌

Yohan de Rose

Sep 6, 2022 — 5 min read

I didn't think life (in a terminal editor) could get so good.

There's nothing more fulfilling than seamless text editing, but some features are beyond vanilla Vim. I've collated some extensions that range from nifty to aphrodisiacal.

I use Neovim but need a backward compatible config, so all of these work well in Vim.

COC - autocomplete, jump to definition and refactor
FZF - fuzzy project file search
Commentary - block commenting
Surround - changing and inserting bracket/quote mark/tag pairs
Highlighted Yank
REST Console - perform HTTP requests
Vimium - vim bindings in a browser

COC

Newer plugins work better and are less bloated, but I love Coc. It's simple to set up and comes with everything out of the box. Decent autocomplete, fast jumping to function definitions and references and clean refactoring.

Ensure you add the languages you use to vimrc.

let g:coc_global_extensions = [
	\ 'coc-snippets',
	\ 'coc-pyright',
	\ 'coc-clangd',
	\ 'coc-sh',
	\ 'coc-vimtex',
	\ 'coc-docker',
	\ 'coc-json',
	\ 'coc-yaml',
	\ 'coc-html',
	\ 'coc-css',
	\ 'coc-tsserver',
	\ 'coc-flutter',
\]

FZF

Essential for larger projects where you can't remember exact functions, variables or file names. FZF is a general-purpose fuzzy finder ported to Vim as a robust project file search.

Knowing what's going on in a command line editor is more of a challenge than using one. This plugin takes orienting yourself and jumping around to a new level.

Commentary

Not the most glamorous plugin, but its absence is excruciating. It is a crime that Vim doesn't come with block commenting, so this avoids having to visual block insert comment characters - then visual block remove them when you've fixed your mess.

Surround

Simultaneous bounding character operations. Insert, change and remove pairs of brackets, quote marks, HTML tags, or anything really.

Highlighted Yank

A quality of life plugin that solves the awkward 'wait, what did I just yank' pause.

REST Console

A great alternative to Postman. List out API requests between three hashes as below, and C-j to send manual HTTP requests.

It's not as good as scripting (you'll need to copy-paste keys and whatnot each request), but a helpful prototyping tool nonetheless.

Vimium

Not a plugin per se. It's a free browser extension that enables vim key bindings.

Press f to identify interactive DOM elements and then corresponding location letters. It makes for smooth switching between editor and browser interaction and a substantial engineer ego boost using the mouse less.