My 5 Must-have vim Plugins

Photo of vim charity: Kibaale Childrens Centre

1. camelcasemotion

   This thing is amazing. With it, all the word-level editing you can do in vim you can do with CamelCase words or variables_with_dashes_in_them. For example, if the cursor was on the ‘h’ in ‘dashes’ in the example, doing c,w will delete ‘hes_’ and go into insert mode. It’s fantastically useful for editing code.

2. rails

   I’ve written about this one before. Very useful for navigating rails projects. :Rmodel post will take you to app/models/post.rb from anywhere. :Rmigration will take you to the most recent migration file, :Rmigration 0 will take you to the schema. There are a ton of others…

3. a.vim

   Another file navigation plugin, but this is for “alternate files”. If you’re editing a C file, it allows you to switch to the corresponding header file with a simple :A command, and vice-versa. Works for many languages, including objective-c.

4. bufexplorer

   I needed this coming from emacs. It provides the equivalent of emacs’ buffer list (C-x C-b). The default keystroke to activate the list is \be. Once the list is up, you can change the sort, select a file to edit, etc.

5. TabIndent

   Another one that mirrors default emacs behavior. If you’re in insert mode and press tab, it will indent the line under the cursor. Sounds simple and perhaps useless, but my brain needs this plugin.