u/jjasgharin r/vim • Recommends
A yearly reminder of How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim), well well worth the watch.
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How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)
thoughtbot
34K subscribers • 19 videos on Hallway
- Recommended by 15 people: 10 on Hacker News, 1 on Lobsters and 4 in engineering communities.
- A classic. People kept recommending it from 2016 to 2025.
- Presented by Max Cantor
- Linked in the descriptionmcantor/no_plugins
Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.
990K views10 years ago15 recommendations
Tools and practiceVim, Emacs and editorsThe shell and command line
Max Cantor explains how to replace popular Vim plugins with built-in features like autocomplete, file jumping, and filesystem navigation.
Vim is big; so big that it does some very useful things that are often overlooked. Plugins can buy us a lot of functionality, but they can add a lot of burden in the form of dependency complexity. In this talk, we'll explore some of the tradeoffs we can make between plugins and "vanilla" Vim features that achieve similar results, including: - autocomplete (VimAwesome, YouCompleteMe) - file jumping (FuzzyFinder, Ctrl-P) - visual filesystem navigation (NERDTree) - build integration - snippets The "slides" and supplemental vimrc are available here: github.com/mcantor/no_plugins Learn more from the developers at thoughtbot ⌨️ Head over to tbot.io/dev-blog to read more great articles on our blog.Why it's here
15 people recommend thisWhat people say. Recommended as a great guide for learning to use Vim's built-in features to maintain a minimal configuration.
Moments people linked to
u/HarveyKandolain r/vim • Recommends
How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)
farisjarrahon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Happy birthday Vim (2020)”
The thoughtbot series on vim is great. I'm really glad I found this video early in my Vim career. I've got a very minimal vimrc as a result and just try to lean into the vim builtins link to this video
flyingfischon Lobsters • Recommends
How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)
jneumann004on Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: How to improve vim productivity and workflow?”
Use the editor that works best for you. I have used Vim every day for almost the last two years and I have learned to work very quickly inside of it. As far as plugins, if one sounds interesting or useful to you, install it. If it doesn't work out, then you can delete it later. Over the years I have tried all of the popular plugins, but I have managed to whittle it down to 4 plus a couple of language specific plugins Here are a couple of handy youtube videos Vim Navigation Commands link How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim) link to this video
wodnyon Hacker News • Recommends
On “A Good Vimrc (2014)”
…Max Cantor "How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)"2. Instead of treating a single vimrc as the best one it's useful to skim through dotfiles and plugins of some influential vim users like Drew Neil3 and Tim Pope4. BTW VimCasts are accompanied by a book. The second edition5 includes changes introduced by Vim 8.0. 1: link 2: link to this video 3: link 4: link 5: link…
ultramannon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Vim plugins and config walkthrough”
I used to use bufftabline, link . I think something like it is what you're looking for? If it's not quite right for you the readme in the github repo mentions some other plugins that have similar capabilities. I really liked bufftabline when I used it. It was lightweight and did exactly what I wanted it to do, give me an immediate visual representation of the buffers I had open in a familiar tab-like format. Eventually I moved towards an even lighter weight setup. Take at look at this video is you're interested in anything like that. link to this video
epicideon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Vim plugins I use”
I like that the intro paragraph discusses the pros and cons of vanilla vs plugins. For those that want to take a look at some more vanilla approaches to some common tasks, Max Cantor has a great talk about that on YouTube 0. 0: link to this video
mhdon Hacker News • Recommends
On “Vim plugins I use”
Let's get this out of the way: "How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)": link to this video And if you want to see some crazy vim usage, there's always Damian Conway: link
DyslexicAtheiston Hacker News • Recommends
On “Coc.nvim – Intellisense Engine for Vim8 and Neovim”
some languages are more verbose than others. if you're dealing with `ProblemProblemFactory` type of abstraction madness and subscribe to the idea of spelling out every variable (MessageCounter instead of "cnt" etc) then this would seem handy. Maybe it's a question of mindset & philosophy. I personally prefer a minimalist but powerful editor without plugins and just rely on their internal capabilities (which granted are a learning curve). It avoids getting stuck when doing $EDITOR foo on a system you don't own and still feel at home and as fast as on your primary workspace. "How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)" : link to this video
noudon Hacker News • Recommends
On “LazyVim”
Am I the only one using vanilla vim with a minimal configuration file (<50 lines)? I set tabs to 4 spaces, put syntax highlighting on, set background to dark, add fuzzy finding, and configure netrw (default file browsing). Very easy to setup. Moreover, when I'm on a different computer and open (vanilla) vim without any configurations. I know that everything is more or less the same as my default vim environment. I think it's not that hard to learn developing in the default vim environment, with some minor tweaks. Also related, How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim): link to this video
gregjoron Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: Programmers who don't use autocomplete/LSP, how do you do it?”
I use vim with ctags. vim has good autocomplete but I don't use it much -- I rely on memory and looking things up in the docs. With ctags I can jump to definition/implementation of a function. ctags has worked since the early 1990s. Check out this video: How to do 90% of what plugins do with just vim. link to this video
gregjoron Hacker News • Recommends
On “Ask HN: Alternative to VS Code?”
…popovers, along with navigating to functions and class definitions. No LSP needed. An LSP will do it better but with sometimes significant overhead. As I noted I don't use VSCode or a JetBrains IDE. I know about them and have used them. My setup works language-agnostic, and I also work in multiple languages. Possibly useful, at least interesting: link to this video…
skydhashon Hacker News • Recommends
On “OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24 hours”
With editors like vim, neovim, emacs, it's way easier to get the lay of the land first (tutorial, play around with the default config,..) and then list out what you need. My vim config has three things only: LSP, FZF (for anything fuzzy), and Plug (to install the above two). There's also a few niceties, but I could do without them. or vendor them into the main config. But it's not my daily editor, so that's just the base config. Anything I could add on top of that would depend on the projects I would need it for. That's about 200 lines (the lsp config is 1/4 of that) NB. A nice talk even if it's about vim "How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)" link to this video