I’ve kept my vimrc more or less under version control for most of the last 8 years, so I thought it might be a fun adventure to look at my plugin use from vim noob -> long in the tooth veteran.

I’ve marked anything that has survived to my current vimc with a ⭐️

Trigger warning: if you are vim plugin or vimrc minimalist this post may not be for you.

March 2014

https://github.com/nicwest/.dotfiles/blob/91fc2dbed4a84a3b110571c6837435222753f936/vim/.vimrc

So it’s march 2014. Pawel has just introduced me to vim, bootstrapped my vimrc, and got my stuff under version control. (Thanks Pawel!).

plugins:

Bundle 'FuzzyFinder'
Bundle 'L9'
Bundle 'Lokaltog/vim-easymotion'
Bundle 'airblade/vim-gitgutter'
Bundle 'bling/vim-airline'
Bundle 'edkolev/tmuxline.vim'
Bundle 'git://git.wincent.com/command-t.git'
Bundle 'gmarik/vundle'
Bundle 'jpythonfold.vim'
Bundle 'kien/ctrlp.vim'
Bundle 'mhinz/vim-signify'
" Bundle 'nvie/vim-flake8'
Bundle 'python.vim'
Bundle 'rstacruz/sparkup', {'rtp': 'vim/'}
Bundle 'scrooloose/syntastic'
Bundle 'tomasr/molokai'
Bundle 'tpope/vim-fugitive'
Bundle 'tpope/vim-rails.git'
Bundle 'tpope/vim-surround'

so brief round up of what we have here

Aesthetic stuff

Fairly standard “I am new to vim” bling here. I don’t remember what molokai looked like and sadly the images are gone. I was getting used to using tmux as well.

Project exploration

Fuzzy Find for all the things. Fairly certain there is a fair amount of cross over with these three, I was clearly searching for some kind of functionality and not really finding it in it’s entirety from just one of these plugins.

Language utilities

I was predominantly working in python at this point. I think python.vim adds syntax highlighting. vim-flake8 is commented out because I was probably getting what I needed from syntastic.

Sparkup looks like a cool way to expand css paths into HTML. I was doing a lot of django template work around this time so this one makes sense.

I have no idea what vim-rails is doing there, I don’t think I’ve ever worked in ruby/rails…

Git utilities

It’s probably fair to say that git was still a bit of a mystery to me in 2014. I’m fairly certain that gitgutter and signify do the same thing. Fugitive is of course a Tim Pope classic and needs no explaining.

General utilities

Easy motion looks like a cool navigating up and down plugin. I still had mouse binds in my vimrc at this time so I probably wasn’t super comfortable with keyboard navigation yet.

Special mention for Tim Pope’s surround here, as it’s the only plugin in this list to have survived to this day. It’s so intuitive and so idiomatic that I would argue that it should be the default behavior of the s key.

April 2014

https://github.com/nicwest/.dotfiles/blob/173fc9ab58690648a7f408cb1ec4152f4c75e209/vim/.vimrc

In April 2014 I’ve cut the apron strings and I’m starting to head out on my own vim adventure.

Bundle 'FuzzyFinder'
Bundle 'L9'
Bundle 'Raimondi/delimitMate'
Bundle 'airblade/vim-gitgutter'
Bundle 'edkolev/tmuxline.vim'
Bundle 'ervandew/supertab'
Bundle 'gitignore'
Bundle 'gmarik/vundle'
Bundle 'itchyny/lightline.vim'
Bundle 'jaxbot/github-issues.vim'
Bundle 'jpythonfold.vim'
Bundle 'junegunn/goyo.vim'
Bundle 'kien/ctrlp.vim'
Bundle 'mattn/emmet-vim'
Bundle 'rstacruz/sparkup', {'rtp': 'vim/'}
Bundle 'scratch.vim'
Bundle 'scrooloose/nerdcommenter'
Bundle 'scrooloose/nerdtree'
Bundle 'scrooloose/syntastic'
Bundle 'tacahiroy/ctrlp-funky'
Bundle 'terryma/vim-expand-region'
Bundle 'tpope/vim-eunuch'
Bundle 'tpope/vim-fugitive'
Bundle 'tpope/vim-repeat'
Bundle 'tpope/vim-surround'
Bundle 'w0ng/vim-hybrid'

Aesthetic stuff

Hybrid is the vim colorscheme I use to this day. I’m actually surprised how early this entered my world, I thought it came a lot later.

Goyo adds a “focus” mode to vim and tries to cut out visual distractions. This probably a good indication that my environment had a few too many bells and whistles going on.

Lightline replaces airline

Project exploration

I’m still trying to figure out fuzzy searching, command-t dies and a mod for ctrl-p is added to be able to search functions.

Nerd tree adds a “here are all of your files” side bar to vim. I was probably missing the same behaviour from sublime text or pycharm.

Language Utilities

More HTML tools. python.vim and vim-flake8 and the rails plugin clearly didn’t survive long.

Git utilities

github-issues.vim gitignore

At this time I’m at my first job where I’ve been able to work a) professionally with git and b) with other developers using github.

Tab completion

The start of a long running struggle to find some kind of tab completion that I liked.

General utilities

DelimitMate automatically adds closing quotes, brackets, etc. simple, clever, language agnostic, and is another plugin that has never left my vimrc.

NerdCommenter adds keybinds for commenting things in and out. It’s language agnostic and does pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. This is another plugin that has never left my vimrc and I would argue is good enough to be included in vim as default behaviour.

Repeat (another tpope classic) overloads the . keybind to allow allow repeating of custom actions defined by plugins. This is another mainstay of my vimrc to this day.

June 2014

Summer 2014 is when clojure entered my life. I don’t exactly remember where this came from, but I have sneaky suspicion that it was because Tim Pope was into it.

Bundle 'gmarik/Vundle.vim'
Bundle 'FuzzyFinder'
Bundle 'L9'
Bundle 'gitignore'
Bundle 'Raimondi/delimitMate'
Bundle 'SirVer/ultisnips'
Bundle 'Valloric/YouCompleteMe'
Bundle 'airblade/vim-gitgutter'
Bundle 'christoomey/vim-tmux-navigator'
Bundle 'guns/vim-clojure-static'
Bundle 'honza/vim-snippets'
Bundle 'itchyny/lightline.vim'
Bundle 'jpythonfold.vim'
Bundle 'kien/ctrlp.vim'
Bundle 'kien/rainbow_parentheses.vim'
Bundle 'lord-garbage/tslime.vim'
Bundle 'rking/ag.vim'
Bundle 'scratch.vim'
Bundle 'scrooloose/nerdcommenter'
Bundle 'scrooloose/nerdtree'
Bundle 'scrooloose/syntastic'
Bundle 'tpope/vim-fireplace'
Bundle 'tpope/vim-fugitive'
Bundle 'tpope/vim-repeat'
Bundle 'tpope/vim-surround'
Bundle 'w0ng/vim-hybrid'
Bundle 'wellle/targets.vim'

Aesthetic stuff

With a lisp in my life I was suddenly overwhelmed by the number brackets I was having to deal with.

Light line looks to have finally won the status line war.

Project exploration

Still trying to figure out how to get around a project sensibly. ag is yet another fuzzy project search plugin.

Snippets

Start of a (brief) adventure into snippets.

Language Utilities

Tslime is a poor man’s slime (a classic emacs plugin and bread and butter in a traditional lisp enviroment). tslime tries to do the same thing for vim using a tmux split.

vim-clojure-static was merged into vim in 7.3.803 and provides things like syntax highlighting.

vim-fireplace is Tim Pope’s answer to the slime problem above. Rather than attempting to emulate emacs, it sort of does it’s own thing in an ideomatic vim way. For me this won out and was my main interface for the rest of my clojuring, but I believe that tim moved to emacs in evil mode as the clojure tooling at the time was just a lot better.

Tab completion

YCM is a big unwieldy program with a vim interface and sort of adds a predictive super power to your text editor. YCM would cycle in and out of my vimrc for a number of years.

General utilities

vim-tmux-navigator is probably one of the cleverest vim plugins ever written. it seamlessly allows you to use the same keybinds to navigate splits in both vim and tmux and alleviates a massive headache in that particular set up.

Targets fills in the (arguably I guess) missing text objects in vim. This plugin has survived to this day and has become such a staple part of how I use vim that I really struggle on an environment without it.

I also moved from vundle to vim-plug

April 2015

ohttps://github.com/nicwest/.dotfiles/blob/866a713d3496e1c7bf4347e8801f1dc685366e17/vim/.vimrc

Fast forward most of a year to April 2015. I’ve discovered that writing vim plugins is fun. Clojure is still a thing I’m into

https://github.com/nicwest/.dotfiles/blob/866a713d3496e1c7bf4347e8801f1dc685366e17/vim/.vimrc

Plug 'FuzzyFinder'
Plug 'L9'
Plug 'Raimondi/delimitMate'
Plug 'airblade/vim-gitgutter'
Plug 'chase/vim-ansible-yaml'
Plug 'christoomey/vim-tmux-navigator'
Plug 'guns/vim-clojure-static'
Plug 'haya14busa/incsearch.vim'
Plug 'jpythonfold.vim'
Plug 'junegunn/goyo.vim'
Plug 'luochen1990/rainbow'
Plug 'edkolev/tmuxline.vim'
Plug 'nicwest/tslime.vim'
Plug 'nicwest/vim-arrow'
Plug 'nicwest/vim-workman'
"Plug 'nicwest/vim-filebeagle', {'branch': 'gitignore'}
Plug 'nicwest/vim-after-syntax-vim'
Plug 'nicwest/QQ.vim', {'branch': 'feat-body'}
Plug 'nicwest/template-bucket'
Plug 'nicwest/vim-flake8'
Plug 'rking/ag.vim'
Plug 'scrooloose/nerdcommenter'
Plug 'chriskempson/base16-vim'
Plug 'jeetsukumaran/vim-filebeagle'
Plug 'scrooloose/syntastic'
Plug 'tpope/vim-endwise'
Plug 'tpope/vim-fireplace'
Plug 'tpope/vim-fugitive'
Plug 'tpope/vim-repeat'
Plug 'tpope/vim-surround'
Plug 'tpope/vim-scriptease'
Plug 'tpope/vim-projectionist'
Plug 'wellle/targets.vim'

Aesthetic stuff

I clearly had minor deviation into other color schemes, but ultimately ended up returning to hybrid.

Notably light line dropped, but tmux line is back?

I also swapped to a lighter weight parenthesis highlighting plugin. If I remember rightly this was due to performance issues. I still use this today and it’s useful way beyond just lisp based languages.

Project exploration

I either read Drew Neil’s Oil and vinegar - split windows and the project drawer or saw him talk about it at vim london, (possibly both). Any I was convinced (still am), threw away my nerdtree and went, and went and found nice looking project drawer. I made a few quality of life changes that the author was kind enough to merge, and it’s been my primary navigation tool ever since.

Projectionist is another tim pope classic that allows you to quickly swap to common files or between tightly coupled files. Genuinely awesome but also super dependant on your co-workers to either use the same plugin or follow you project structure (or be OK with you constantly reorganising things)

Me things

I’m not going to dive too deeply into these, most were itch scratching none of of them survived that long.

QQ.vim is worth mentioning solely on the basis of how useless it is. It was an attempt to do postman but in vim. I wrote it (somewhat drunkenly) over Christmas that year, posted it to reddit and never really looked at it again. I believe that people find it when looking for the chinese search engine and think it must be related? Anyway I learnt a lot of vim script and was the first real thing I’d open sourced that people had looked at in any significant numbers.

Language Utilities

Some vim plugin writing flavoured addons joined the mix.

General Utilities

Incrementally highlights ALL pattern matches unlike default ‘incsearch’. Fun fact this one is still in my vimrc but the functionality was merged into vim in Patch 8.0.1238 (5 years ago!). I’m including it in my list of “still in my vimrc” purely on the basis of a) still being in my vimrc and b) being so useful!

August 2016

https://github.com/nicwest/.dotfiles/blob/9733f57f449ed53a4066531c4ee64934b81917c4/vim/.vimrc

Jump forward again, this time I’ve got a new job. I’m still writing a lot of python, but I’m also writing C, Obj-C and Golang professional, and Clojure and Vimscript in my spare time.

Plug 'FuzzyFinder'
Plug 'L9'
Plug 'Raimondi/delimitMate'
Plug 'chase/vim-ansible-yaml'
Plug 'christoomey/vim-tmux-navigator'
Plug 'fatih/vim-go'
Plug 'haya14busa/incsearch.vim'
Plug 'honza/vim-snippets'
Plug 'jpythonfold.vim'
Plug 'luochen1990/rainbow'
Plug 'nicwest/tslime.vim'
Plug 'majutsushi/tagbar'
"Plug 'nicwest/vim-arrow'
Plug '/home/nic/sideprojects/vim-workman'
Plug '/home/nic/sideprojects/vim-requester'
Plug 'nicwest/vim-after-syntax-vim'
Plug 'nicwest/QQ.vim'
Plug 'nicwest/cocoa.vim', {'branch': 'syntax-only'}
Plug 'nicwest/vim-bnext'
Plug 'git@github.com:nicwest/template-bucket.git'
Plug 'nicwest/vim-flake8'
Plug 'rking/ag.vim'
Plug 'scrooloose/nerdcommenter'
Plug 'SirVer/ultisnips'
Plug 'w0ng/vim-hybrid'
Plug 'jeetsukumaran/vim-filebeagle'
Plug 'scrooloose/syntastic'
Plug 'tommcdo/vim-fubitive'
Plug 'tpope/vim-endwise'
Plug 'tpope/vim-fireplace'
Plug 'tpope/vim-fugitive'
Plug 'tpope/vim-repeat'
Plug 'tpope/vim-surround'
Plug 'tpope/vim-scriptease'
Plug 'tpope/vim-projectionist'
Plug 'wellle/targets.vim'
Plug 'Valloric/YouCompleteMe'
Plug 'vim-jp/vital.vim'
Plug '/home/nic/sideprojects/vim-git-appraise'

Language Utilities

Go was probably the first language that I worked in (other than C I guess), that really had first rate vim tooling. It’s an opinionated language and vim-go does a bunch of the heavy lifting it making that a good thing not a bad thing.

Tagbar and Cocoa were related to the C/Obj-C work I was doing

Vital is an awesomely plugable vim standard library. Seriously it’s worth going and having a look at what those guys at vim-jp have put together. If I were still writing a lot of vim plugins this would still be in my vimrc.

me stuff

More shitty me stuff that I started and didn’t finish.

I don’t have any recollection of what exactly vim-requester was but I would like to believe it was a precursor to rewriting QQ.vim.

October 2016

https://github.com/nicwest/dotstow/blob/fe122807f35e04066e1e7659bb83e0ae9ab4ef71/vim/.vimrc

I finally got round to having a bit of vimrc spring cleaning in 2016 and ditched a lot of the crap I’d picked up over the years. Additionally I moved to using stow for dotfile management and change repositories. From this point onwards maintaining a sensible linear time line becomes a bit more complicated as I multiple machines I was working on, with different configuration in different branches.

Plug 'Raimondi/delimitMate'
Plug 'SirVer/ultisnips'
Plug 'fatih/vim-go'
Plug 'guns/vim-slamhound'
Plug 'haya14busa/incsearch.vim'
Plug 'jeetsukumaran/vim-filebeagle'
Plug 'jpythonfold.vim'
Plug 'luochen1990/rainbow'
Plug 'nicwest/template-bucket'
Plug 'scrooloose/nerdcommenter'
Plug 'scrooloose/syntastic'
Plug 'tpope/vim-fireplace'
Plug 'tpope/vim-projectionist'
Plug 'tpope/vim-surround'
Plug 'wellle/targets.vim'
Plug '/home/nic/sideprojects/vim-http'

Language Utilities

Slamhoud is a clojure tool for avoiding doing actual work your self. I liked it a lot at the time, but it looks like it’s no longer active :(

Project exploration

Worth noting that all the fuzzy matching stuff is gone by this point. I came to conclusion that fuzzy searching codebases was a large code base anti pattern. I was working in a team where we had all become highly dependant on fuzzy searching and as such no one really paid much attention to organising the code in a sensible manner. That useful tool had become a requirement and that lack of organisation resulted in more wasted time than the use of the tool saved in the first place. I think I still stand by this view point, and I’ve not bothered with dedicated code base searching since.

Tab completion

Also worth noting that all Tab completion stuff is gone by this point. It felt like a crutch. I was going into environments where I couldn’t install YCM and was unable to function properly. I figured out that I could get almost all of what I needed from vim’s built in completion and just reading documentation/source code. I removed YCM from my vimrc around this time and honestly I’ve not missed it one bit.

Me stuff

I think this started off as just being syntax highlighting for raw HTTP requests. I use these quite a lot in documentation to do a language agnostic examples of API requests/responses. Then I thought about making those examples executable. One thing lead to another and ended up trying to do QQ.vim but in a way that made sense to me as a vim user rather than just blindly trying to translate features from postman into vim script.

This is probably one of only two vim plugins that I have written that I really like and actively use on a daily basis.

October 2017

https://github.com/nicwest/dotstow/blob/0c01b456a5bf319b8337651a3f2061b449685dd1/vim/.vimrc

Jump forward another year. Largely writing python and go at work, and clojure and vimscript at home.

Plug 'Raimondi/delimitMate'
Plug 'fatih/vim-go'
Plug 'guns/vim-slamhound'
Plug 'haya14busa/incsearch.vim'
Plug 'jeetsukumaran/vim-filebeagle'
Plug 'jpythonfold.vim'
Plug 'luochen1990/rainbow'
Plug 'scrooloose/nerdcommenter'
Plug 'scrooloose/syntastic'
Plug 'tpope/vim-fireplace'
Plug 'tpope/vim-projectionist'
Plug 'tpope/vim-scriptease'
Plug 'tpope/vim-surround'
Plug 'tpope/vim-repeat'
Plug 'tpope/vim-unimpaired'
Plug 'wellle/targets.vim'
Plug 'vim-jp/vital.vim'
Plug '/home/nic/src/vim-filebeagle'
Plug '/home/nic/sideprojects/vim-http'
Plug '/home/nic/sideprojects/vim-spacey'
Plug '/home/nic/sideprojects/template-bucket'
Plug '/home/nic/sideprojects/vim-generate'
Plug '/home/nic/sideprojects/vim-camelsnek'

General Utilities

Another Tpope classic makes a brief apperence, I don’t remember why…

Me stuff

Spacey… I was clearly writing something with lots of underscores or hyphens or something inplace of spaces, This pluggin toggles the space bar to temporarily use a differnent character instead. Surfices to say this probably only saw about 1 afternoon of daylight.

Camelsnek coverts between camel case and snake case. I’ve since been told that this functionality already exists in https://github.com/tpope/vim-abolish.

Generate is like faker for vim. oftern in tests and what not you want some random example of an email address, or a timestamp, or a uuid. currently missing from my vimrc and I need to put it back.

Jan 2019

https://github.com/nicwest/dotstow/blob/a88eca10169239ad717c21f966ee826f9d544357/vim/.vimrc

New job, new laptop. Only really writing python and terraform at this point.

Plug 'andreypopp/vim-colors-plain'
Plug 'Raimondi/delimitMate'
Plug 'fatih/vim-go'
Plug 'guns/vim-slamhound'
Plug 'haya14busa/incsearch.vim'
"Plug 'jeetsukumaran/vim-filebeagle'
Plug 'junegunn/vader.vim'
Plug 'luochen1990/rainbow'
Plug 'scrooloose/nerdcommenter'
Plug 'tpope/vim-fireplace'
Plug 'tpope/vim-projectionist'
Plug 'tpope/vim-scriptease'
Plug 'tpope/vim-surround'
Plug 'tpope/vim-repeat'
Plug 'tpope/vim-unimpaired'
Plug 'w0rp/ale'
Plug 'wellle/targets.vim'
Plug 'vim-jp/vital.vim'
Plug '/home/nic/src/vim-filebeagle'
Plug '/home/nic/sideprojects/vim-http'
Plug '/home/nic/sideprojects/vim-spacey'
Plug '/home/nic/sideprojects/template-bucket'
Plug '/home/nic/sideprojects/vim-generate'
Plug '/home/nic/sideprojects/vim-camelsnek'
Plug '/home/nic/sideprojects/vim-dict'
Plug '/home/nic/sideprojects/vim-folding'
Plug '/home/nic/sideprojects/vim-pipsearch'

Aesthetic Utilities

I was working out side a fair bit that summer and hybrid’s dark background was hard to read in direct sunlight.

Language Utilities

The big addition to my vim life at this point in time was async syntax highlighting and fixing. w0rp’s ALE blew syntastic out of the water and has been a staple of my vimrc ever since.

Vader is a testing lib for vimscript.

Me stuff

Jpythonfold had become a core part of my python tooling over the years. But occasionally I would run into a code base that just wouldn’t fold well, and that was super frustrating. I tried to “fix” jpythonfold for a bit before throwing up my hands and trying to write my own folding lib from scratch. I think mine was an improvement generally, but it turned out to be a really difficult problem to solve and I eventually gave up on folding all together.

Feb 2021

https://github.com/nicwest/dotstow/blob/e364f8837780991b4a5943dce7e87468c7c80b3e/vim/.vimrc

Plug in wise, almost nothing changes for over 2 years. I’m super absorbed by work and don’t find a lot of time to write or learn anything in my free time.

Plug 'Raimondi/delimitMate'
Plug 'fatih/vim-go'
Plug 'guns/vim-slamhound'
Plug 'haya14busa/incsearch.vim'
Plug 'jeetsukumaran/vim-filebeagle'
Plug 'junegunn/vader.vim'
Plug 'leafgarland/typescript-vim'
Plug 'luochen1990/rainbow'
Plug 'scrooloose/nerdcommenter'
Plug 'tpope/vim-fireplace'
Plug 'tpope/vim-projectionist'
Plug 'tpope/vim-scriptease'
Plug 'tpope/vim-surround'
Plug 'tpope/vim-repeat'
Plug 'tpope/vim-unimpaired'
Plug 'w0rp/ale'
Plug 'wellle/targets.vim'
Plug 'vim-jp/vital.vim'

Plug '/home/nic.west/sideprojects/vim-http'
Plug '/home/nic.west/sideprojects/vim-generate'
Plug '/home/nic.west/sideprojects/vim-camelsnek'
Plug '/home/nic.west/sideprojects/vim-workman'

Language Utilities

I picked up a little bit of react so I could help out our frontend team when they were understaffed. React is fun, I really really really don’t see the point of typescript though.

May 2022

https://github.com/nicwest/dotstow/blob/602f3f98e3b526d742c0db0c994e0fa09f7a58ec/vim/.vimrc

That brings us to today! May 2022. The nature of my job has changed, I’m writing a lot more English than I’m writing python. ALE gets used largely for proselint and writegood rather than flake8. Now adays I spend my free time learning steno and reading books rather than programming.

Plug 'Raimondi/delimitMate'
Plug 'hashivim/vim-terraform'
Plug 'haya14busa/incsearch.vim'
Plug 'jeetsukumaran/vim-filebeagle'
Plug 'luochen1990/rainbow'
Plug 'scrooloose/nerdcommenter'
Plug 'tpope/vim-surround'
Plug 'tpope/vim-repeat'
Plug 'w0rp/ale'
Plug 'wellle/targets.vim'

Plug '/Users/nic.west/sideprojects/vim-http'
Plug '/home/nic.west/sideprojects/vim-generate'
Plug '/home/nic.west/sideprojects/vim-camelsnek'

Note: hybrid and vim-plug are natively installed and are not managed by vim-plug

Language Utilities

My one programming addition is this great plugin for terraform. If you are writing terraform config regularly and not using this I would strongly recommend you try it.

Wrapping up

I think it’s interesting to see how many of the plugins that I use today were added to my vimrc in those first few months of experimentation.

It’s awesome that a couple of these plugins went on to get merged into vim proper. I would love to discover/write something that ubiquitous someday and have the energy to get it merged in the source code.

I’ve enjoyed watching past me struggle with concepts like project navigations and tab completion, and what does and doesn’t belong in vim (looking at you git).