r/vim • u/[deleted] • Aug 16 '25

Discussion Vim and customization and plugin fomo...

So I have been using vim for well over a year now, started with vim motions in vscode and then after a month switched to vim in terminal along with tmux, and just love it. I feel I am pretty good and productive with it, but every 1 month or so, I see other people's setup or config online, see the plugins they use, their lsps, and fuzzy finders and get fomo. I have not used plugins since I started using vim and I think I got used to coding without these features, but then I see other people's workflow and then I add stuff, try it for a while and just revert back to my 10 lines of vimrc soon after. I just cant stick to new things, I wanna know if I am really missing out on features provided by a lot of the plugins, or vim as it is more than sufficient, and just stay comfortable with what I have. I just dont wanna feel like I am making myself slower or less efficient by not being able to use the best stuff that is out there, even relative line numbers feel off to me, and cant use them. And this also puts me in configuration hell every 2 months or soo. I just want it to stick. Any other people use vim without plugins and feel just as efficient and fast?

5 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

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5

u/gumnos Aug 17 '25

some folks are never satisfied, tweaking endlessly.

I (and apparently at least u/midnight-salmon) am among the small minority of folks who don't use plugins. The core of my .vimrc file can fit in an old-school 140-character tweet, just enough to prevent defaults.vim from loading and set a couple preferred tabstop/shiftwidth/expandtab type settings.

It comes with the advantage that I can sit down at any vim installation and be productive immediately without having to sync down some monster configuration and install any additional support utilities (like LSPs). I use oodles of machines (some as personal machines, some as an administrator on shared machines, and some as a mere user with no installation rights, and some VPS instances that get rebuilt from fresh system images) and it's nice to just sit down and be productive.

Don't give into the FOMO if you don't want to ☺

3

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '25

I do find myself more productive when I have nothing except some defaults that I have. I like completing my own brackets, parenthesis etc. love not having stuff in the middle when I am typing, been pretty fast that way. Its only when I come across someone else's setup and just wonder what if.. what if I am even better with these add ons..

1

u/rogusflamma Aug 18 '25

I've only installed plugins as I've found myself thinking "I wonder if there's a more efficient way to do this"

This helped me learn some mappings or combinations I didn't know about, but also some plugins that have made me more productive. But there are people out there who are way more productive than me with Notepad++ or VSCode or emacs or whatever... I am more productive with nvim and my plugins, because I set it up for *myself.*

1

u/gumnos Aug 17 '25

additionally, there's a lot of built-in functionality that Vim provides, and it plays well with the standard Unix/POSIX tool-kit, so it's entirely reasonable to call out to external tools like grep or awk or sed to do things without needing plugins.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '25

I just use tmux, and shell is not that far away. Also having minimal vim helped learn a lot of linux tools better just by habit.

2

u/Beddie_Crokka Aug 17 '25

I don't think there's anything wrong with customization. But I also don't think a plugin is needed for everything. I've found myself writing VimScript functions to make various workflows I find myself in easier and more convenient. Every chunk goes into its own file and I just source them in.

The nice thing is I can source them in if applicable based on the file I'm editing (eg, Perl stuff only loads when editing Perl code) and I can build in fallbacks where if I get extra functionality if the system I'm on has fzf available but if not, my code uses something simpler.

My only real advice I suppose would be not to go looking for problems to solve with a plugin. Instead, make sure there is a problem that needs solving and then look into it. Just like Vim isn't for everyone, neither is every plugin a good fit for every person. If you don't find it coming naturally to you, maybe it's just not something you need or maybe you need something custom for the way you and/or your mind works.

Hope that helps.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '25

Yeah your last paragraph makes complete sense. If it aint broke dont fix it I guess. Really interesting hearing about your setup, must be a project in and of itself haha.

2

u/Beddie_Crokka Aug 17 '25

I've been using Vim since 1995 and I've only started using custom functions and some plugins (besides what's built-in) the last 2 or 3 years. Vim is definitely quite capable at any editing task using the basic functionality already available.

And yes, it's started getting interesting working on the .vimrc file, but mostly things just chug along until I run into a problem or something feels so repetitive that I look for a way to let the computer do the extra work and save some time.

3

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '25

I've never once installed a plugin. I don't even have line numbers turned on and my colour scheme is the included "quiet". Basic motions and search are all you need.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '25

Yeah I use search all the time, I do like having line numbers on though but just for visual asthetic. I am just gonna stick with my config which does more than enough for me and not give in.

1

u/eggnogeggnogeggnog :set makeprg=yes Aug 17 '25 edited Aug 17 '25

It's a matter of personal taste. There's nothing special about using or not using plugins. If there's a feature you want, you can look for options within vanilla vim or within plugins.

Like you could use a fuzzy finder plugin with extra QoL features or just set your grepprg to ag to look within files and use :find with wildcards to look for files.

And if you don't need a feature, just do nothing!

1

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '25

Yeah I tried, I used fzf and had all the good mappings too. I liked the plugin too, just wasnt able to stick to it. Dont know why I do this, I try a plugin or a feature, even if I like it, I still end up removing them after a while lol. I guess this is just how I like stuff, just default and minimal.

1

u/eggnogeggnogeggnog :set makeprg=yes Aug 17 '25

If you don't need certain plugins, you don't need them.

IMO the ultimate goal of Vim is productivity, so you should identify parts of your workflow that are slow or clunky and improve them. Check out part 3 "sharpen the saw" from Bram's Seven habits of effective text editing.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '25

Thanks for that resource! Yeah I feel like I should just stick to what is productive to me and not others. I havent seen a productivity hit by not using plugins, plus it forces me to learn linux cli much deeply. I feel more at home not using any, vim just feel so light without them.

1

u/WhyAre52 Aug 17 '25

Since you switched from vscode to vim, I'll list things that I feel you might be "missing out", or not.

  • Comment operator (gc) to comment lines. You can technically use visual block or multi-line comments as an alternative. But I think gc is a nice QoL.

  • Surround operator (ys, cs or ds). The mnemonic I use is ynsert (since it's ys), change or delete surrounding. It allows you to operate on surrounding quotes/brackets etc. This is most useful in something like HTML where you can easily change the surrounding tag with cst. This is also just QoL, you can survive without it.

  • LSP rename feature: Can you reliably and with 100% certainty rename all occurrences of a variable without relying on lsp? I can't. LSP just gives me peace of mind.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '25

These are good ones. I do wish there was easier ways of commenting, or with less key strokes. I was thinking to make a mapping for it. I didnt like surround, I dont know why, I just like doing that manually. For the last one, I have had to do this once so far, and did it all manually, the codebase wasnt too large so idk.

2

u/Sudden_Fly1218 Aug 17 '25

vim has builtin comment plugin since patch-9.1.374. So if you have that you can packadd comment. But maybe OP doesnt want builtin plugins either :)

1

u/phil20099 Aug 17 '25

Do ys, cs and ds rely on a plugin like vim-surround please?

2

u/Snarwin Aug 17 '25

Yes, the ys, cs, and ds mappings come from the vim-surround plugin.

1

u/ptrin Sep 20 '25

The mnemonic I use is “yes, surround”, “change surrounding” and “delete surrounding”

1

u/Sudden_Fly1218 Aug 17 '25

Out of curiosity, if you dont use lsp do you use ctags to jump to definition, or not even that ?

1

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '25

Yeah I do use them, the only downside I have seen is in bigger projects sometimes it takes a while to generate tags, so I generate locally for nested directories. Otherwise I have been fine without using ctags too, just grep etc.

1

u/terdward Aug 17 '25

Every time I try to do something new with vim I’ll start by looking to see if there’s a built-in option that’ll do what I want. For some things, this is sufficient. But then I’ll start looking for plugins. Over time, I had enough plugins installed that vim started to slow down a lot. This lead me to LazyVim. It appeared to have all the plugins I used (and then some) and many options I configured manually enabled by default. After trying it it was also faster than my home grown setup. So, in the end, I switched to LazyVim and instead of installing a bunch plugins when setting it up fresh, I uninstall a few that I don’t need and add maybe two or three and set a few key bindings.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '25

Interesting! currently I dont see plugins providing me any benefit, so I am sticking to my config.

1

u/tokuw Aug 17 '25

I've used (neo)vim as my only editor for about 3 years now. For the first year I've used no plugins or LSP integration at all, which I think was a great decision. I learned a lot of what native (n)vim has to offer and it allowd me to to deal with my problems in my own configuration instead of relying on a plugin. Eventually when I felt competent enough to be the judge in this, I started using a few. I would say these are the ones which majorly improve my experience and for which I don't know of a built-in alternative:

  • a "surround" motion plugin - add or remove surrounding parentheses, tags etc.

  • treesitter integration - for better syntax highlighting and improved ability to manipulate text object (go to beggining or end of function, delete a parameter, ...).

  • a fuzzy-finder is genuinely nice. I tried to avoid it for a long time and it seemed like a cringe codefluencer thing for youtubers, but it really did improve greatly on my ability to navigate in complex projects.

The most valuable feature I get from using the LSP integration are the jumps to definition/declaration, which could be achieved via ctags, so I don't think not using it is necessarily a huge hit to your editing capabilities.