Plugins

Like Emacs, vim is also programmable and extensible via plugins.

Everyone has his own list of favorite plugins. Mine (so far) are;

• auto-pairs: Insert or delete brackets, parens, quotes in pair.
• fugitive: Interface for git.
• pathogen: Easy management of plugins. Since a lot of modules are available on github I use git to manage my .vim directory with most of the plugins as sub-modules. To use pathogen, the first command in my .vimrc file is: execute pathogen#infect().
• syntastic: Syntax checking of source code whenever a file is saved. This gives immediate feedback when you are writing code. Very helpful in fixing code now rather than later.
• ultisnips: Fast insertion of often used fragments. This is a real must-have in my opinion. The snipmate plugin is mentioned more often but Ultisnips is more powerful. It needs a vim compiled with Python support but as an upside you can use python code to generate snippets.
• vim-airline: Cool status bar.
• vim-colors-solarized: The dark variant is my preferred color scheme for gvim.
• vim-dirvish: Alternative for netrw. I tried vim-vinegar but it tends to leave netrw buffers that are hard to close.
• vim-surround: For changing “surroundings” (quotes, brackets et cetera).
• tabular: For aligning text tables.

Configuration

You can download my complete vimrc if you want to. But I want to highlight some settings that I found interesting or difficult to figure out, in the hope it helps.

To make use of the pathogen plugin manager, the _first_ command in your vimrc should be:

execute pathogen#infect()

In normal mode, the <leader> key is used to basically get a whole new namespace to link commands to keys. By default this is mapped to the \ key. I find it more convenient to use the spacebar:

let mapleader = "\<Space>"

Compatibility with the old vi is not really important for me, so I’ve switched that off.

set nocompatible

Using UTF-8 encoding should be an easy decision these days for someone like me who writes mostly in English or Dutch (or one of several programming languages). Unicode is a widely-used standard (ISO 10646) for encoding text, and UTF-8 is an encoding that is backwards compatible with ASCII and Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1). It is not always straightforward to detect the encoding of a file, so it is good to be explicit about this.

set encoding=utf8

Since I keep stuff I care about under revision control with git, I switched off automatic backups:

set nobackup
set nowritebackup
set noswapfile

You can have vim automatically re-flow paragraphs when you insert or delete text. This does not always work well. E.g. in ReStructuredText it messes up headers. So I wrote the following function to toggle that behavior, complete with a message to the user and a key binding in normal mode:

function Toggle_autofill()
    if &fo =~ "a"
        set formatoptions-=a
        echo "Disabling automatic filling"
    else
        set formatoptions+=a
        echo "Enabling automatic filling"
    endif
endfunction
nnoremap <leader>a :call Toggle_autofill()<cr>

Additionally, I’ve set up a key binding to format the current paragraph:

nnoremap <leader>f gqap

In normal mode, vim can use the h,j,k,l keys to move the cursor (left, down, up, right. You can also use the arrow keys, of course). To move around windows, you can use the same letter keys but you have to press ctrl-w first. I decided to do some remapping to use ctrl+h,j,k,l to move around windows:

noremap <c-h> <c-w>h
noremap <c-j> <c-w>j
noremap <c-k> <c-w>k
noremap <c-l> <c-w>l

With regard to ultisnips, by default it uses ctrl-k for the backward jump trigger when inserting snippets. This is unfortunate because the default mapping for that key is to insert digraphs, which is a feature I often use. So I added the following code to my .vimrc to fix that:

let g:UltiSnipsExpandTrigger="<tab>"
let g:UltiSnipsJumpForwardTrigger="<tab>"
let g:UltiSnipsJumpBackwardTrigger="<s-tab>"

BTW, the default digraphs that vim uses are those from RFC1345.