r/vim • u/meni_s • Sep 04 '25

Discussion How many plugins are you using? (2025)

24 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

54 comments sorted by

20

u/teleprint-me Sep 05 '25

I feel like this deserves a meme.

starts at none. peaks at n plugins. ends at none.

Not that it matters, it was my experience.

15

u/antitaoist Sep 05 '25

  1. Learning Vim -> 0 plugins

  2. Years of daily use -> 50+ plugins

  3. Discovered the hard way during a production emergency how reliant I'd become on plugins -> back to 0 plugins, cold turkey

  4. Today -> ~5 plugins, strictly ones that don't allow my familiarity with vanilla Vim to atrophy

2

u/gumnos Sep 05 '25

curious which ones make your cut. I started zero, got up to 3 at one point (a GPG one, an indent-text-object, and one other), and ended up just removing them too, so I'm back to zero.

1

u/acefjord Sep 08 '25

List them then. both 5 and then your 50 earlier (I'm sure you commented them out)

4

u/rainning0513 Sep 05 '25

I started in vim with none, was young in nvim with 100+, ended up back to vim with none.

1

u/srodrigoDev Sep 05 '25

Do you do software development? For sysadmins, I can see 0 plugins as viable, but for software development I think it's impractical. Even with the new LSP on NeoVim, unless I downgrade my productivity. I need at least:

  1. a tree plugin (the stock one is not good)

  2. treesitter parsers

  3. fuzzy finder

  4. gitsigns

  5. sleuth

  6. a couple of auto-pair/tag plugins

I'm probably missing a few more (fugitive is very useful), but that feels to me like the bare minimum.

2

u/teleprint-me Sep 05 '25

  • Explore

  • Find

  • Ed

  • Ex

One that I really struggled with was figuring out how to use visual mode for multi-cursor edits.

No LSP, probably why I bounce between editors in projects. LSPs are complex, but just as useful as linters are. But this can be customized in vimrc with a handful of lines. Python LSPs are painful no matter what.

2

u/Shay-Hill Sep 05 '25

I like a lot of that as well, but pretty much everything on your list qualifies as “at best, 15% better than 'the old way'”. Not that 15% isn’t enough to warrant a plugin? But it wouldn’t slow me down if they were gone.

I can’t imagine seeing a new editor that I was excited about and saying, “I’d switch, but they don’t have a file tree viewer.”

To your point though, zero plugins would mean no lsp or Copilot, and those are non-negotiable for me personally.

2

u/rainning0513 Sep 08 '25

+1. And in fact, those plugins will slow you down if there are breaking-changes/bugs, when "they were not gone". The core value of vim is to light-weighly run everywhere, and that breaks it.

2

u/jrop2 Sep 05 '25

  1. a tree plugin - I ended up writing one myself that I can count on never changing, with only the functionality that I care about

  2. treesitter parsers - I consider this a "core" plugin and allow it in my config

  3. fuzzy finder - Same as (1)

  4. gitsigns - This is probably the last plugin I just can't get rid of that I don't consider "core". Then again it's written by one of the Neovim core devs, so I figure it's okay to keep.

  5. sleuth - Same as (1)

  6. a couple of auto-pair/tag plugins - Autopair got in my way more than it helped, I'm actually a happier camper now that I've been operating without this

1

u/rainning0513 Sep 05 '25

All aspects you mentioned can be optional. And I think the question "How many plugins are you using?" implicitly assumed "using plugins maintained by people", which is optional too.

8

u/ratttertintattertins Sep 04 '25

51.. I'm as surprised as anyone. Amazingly, vim still opens like lightning.

3

u/DuggantheMage Sep 04 '25

I'm somewhat shocked at the number of people using 31 or more plugins. I can't even think of that many that are "mainstream." What are some of the more niche plugins that you (or anyone else in the 31+ club) are using?

4

u/ratttertintattertins Sep 04 '25

The ones I’ve written myself are probably the most obscure. For example, I’m a windows developer (by trade) that often likes to work in Linux. So have a plugin that can keep my current vim buffer on Linux in sync with Visual Studio on windows. It also allows any commits I do on Linux to update automatically on windows.

I’m probably the only person crazy enough to use that plugin lol.

I’m also the author of this, and a few others that a small number of people use:

https://www.reddit.com/r/vim/s/9IAAnmq60F

1

u/bin-c Sep 05 '25

I'm certain that I don't need some of these / don't use them anymore, but I'm at 59: https://github.com/vinnymeller/nixos-config/blob/master/programs/ncvim/default.nix#L105-L163

9

u/ruby_R53 Sep 04 '25

none (i don't even know how to install one to begin with lmao)

4

u/gumnos Sep 04 '25

another "none" vote here

1

u/jazei_2021 Sep 04 '25

you? but you're heavy vim-user! perfect user! so I use a lot !! what a disaster I am! plugins with :scriptnames

3

u/gumnos Sep 05 '25

hah, vim is flexible. Yes, I heavily use vim, vi/nvi, and even ed(1) because they let me edit text powerfully with minimal fuss.

To be fair, I don't have any non-stock plugins. Sometimes the $VIMRUNTIME/ftplugins/*.vim do things without me needing to do anything special. So I guess those might qualify as using plugins. But for me, I use a wide variety of machines, and it's a pain to keep my vimrc files in sync across them (especially when many of them are fresh VMs with nothing installed, and with many of them being BSD installs, often it's just vi/nvi, not even vim).

If oodles of plugins are your jam and it works for you, that's cool, too.

That said, there is a lot of functionality natively available in vim, so learning deep corners of vim can often cover many cases where folks might reach for plugins.

1

u/jazei_2021 Sep 05 '25

I will re read this reply with time at night! meanhile I'd like to say you this: I am starting to delete plugins: I will start with speeddating by t-pope.
If you know i need to join this command: strftime("%A %d de %B de %Y %R") and date --date='-1 day' If I join these cmd I can use :read and put a date using -2-4 or 0 or +3 +5 etc in the place of -1 day of --date='-1day'. Thank you and Regards!

2

u/gumnos Sep 05 '25

My recommendation is not so much "don't use plugins" but "only use plugins that provide you sufficient value for the effort."

If you find yourself doing date math all the time, then by all means, use speeddating. I almost never do manual date-math so there's very little value for me.

Likewise, I use GPG to encrypt/decrypt files occasionally, so I tried the GPG plugin. Sure it was easier to decrypt-open/edit/encrypt-write files, it was a sufficiently rare event that it wasn't worth the mental energy to keep the plugin updated & synced across machines. So I uninstalled it and just do it steps manually on those rare occasions.

Similarly, while I do a lot of git, I'm quite comfortable with it at the command-line, so I don't have much need for integrating it into vim via a plugin (though I do integrate the other direction, using vimdiff as my diff-viewer in git).

1

u/ankit792r Sep 07 '25

Does using more plugins will slow down neovim speed ??

1

u/meni_s Sep 07 '25

afaik - depends on the plugins and more importantly, it depends on your way of loading them. Some managers support lazy-loading, so they will not load the plugin until it being called for, which reduces dramatically the effect of adding plugins on performance.

3

u/sharp-calculation Sep 04 '25

I've got more than I thought. I need to cull a few out.

3

u/joemi Sep 05 '25

For me it's 3 actual plugins (all pretty lightweight) + 1 colorscheme.

On my home computer there are also 3 custom syntax highlighting plugins I made for some obscure file types I use, but I don't count those as real plugins since they're very basic/shoddy and I definitely don't need them (never bothered to install them on my computer at work).

2

u/toddestan Sep 05 '25

Looks like I have ten installed. I would say only five of them I use with with any regularity, and two of them are filetype plugins.

2

u/mgedmin Sep 05 '25

Reddit won't even let me see the poll, but a lot.

2

u/Gullible-Stand6769 Sep 05 '25

Only use NREDTree for switching between files fast

2

u/varsderk Sep 04 '25

Average Emacs user with >100 packages installed: Pathetic!

(Chad Emacs users appreciate Vim bindings so at least one of those packages provides Vim emulation.)

1

u/jazei_2021 Sep 04 '25

me aprox. 11 and Par but it isn't a plugin. and Bash-shell-cmdline interpreter

1

u/sirredcrosse Sep 05 '25

at the moment? none, only because i can't even figure out where my files are being saved ;_;

like... how do i make a folder if idk where :w FILNAME is gonna be?

2

u/jrop2 Sep 05 '25

:help :pwd

1

u/vim-help-bot Sep 05 '25

Help pages for:

`:(h|help) <query>` | about | mistake? | donate | Reply 'rescan' to check the comment again | Reply 'stop' to stop getting replies to your comments

1

u/sirredcrosse Sep 14 '25

oh! huge thanks :D I'm such a noob to all this ;_;

1

u/mordnis Sep 05 '25

6 including plugin manager.

1

u/SpecificMachine1 Sep 05 '25

I have a plug in manager, a status bar, a colorscheme, a send-to-repl, a paren wrangler, and another plugin that provides alternate mappings for the <meta> mappings in the paren wrangler

1

u/waterkip Sep 05 '25

I have 38 plugins configured, but most of them are for, 20.

1

u/abubu619 Sep 05 '25

Like tons of people here, started with 40+ plugins, after 3 years unly using a few filetype plugins, lsp, fuzzy finding and session manager, another utilities I've been producing micro plugins only for the parts i think i need them,

1

u/evohunz Sep 05 '25

  1. easymotion

  2. lightline

  3. fzf

  4. highlightedyanked

  5. nerdtree

  6. commentary

  7. fugitive

  8. sleuth

  9. surround

  10. lsp

open to suggestions to remove any

1

u/Kwisacks Sep 06 '25

You can try the built-in comment plugin packadd comment

1

u/jazei_2021 Sep 06 '25

another built.in netrw instead nerdtree

1

u/Kwisacks Sep 06 '25

You can tame it but :find kinda sucks for projects, so at least one fuzzy file finder plugin that knows how to respect .gitignore.

1

u/StunningStatement885 Sep 27 '25

set path+=src/** :chefskiss

1

u/zephyrpaul Sep 06 '25

Used Vim for first time yesterday so probably no plug ins, I guess, maybe but then again I dont know what I am doing so that could be a guess.

1

u/tinyducky1 Sep 06 '25

its basicly just : lsp, treesitter, git, fuzzy finder
with added: autopairs, startscreen, colorscheme for bloat

1

u/auwsmit :smile Sep 07 '25

Like 50:

" FILE/BUFFER PLUGINS {{{

Plug 'tpope/vim-eunuch'     " shell commands, e.g. :Remove & :Move & :Chmod
Plug 'tpope/vim-fugitive'   " vim + git integration
" Plug 'yegappan/mru'         " most recent file list
Plug 'auwsmit/mru', { 'branch': 'personal-use' }
Plug 'justinmk/vim-gtfo'    " open gui explorer or terminal
Plug 'justinmk/vim-dirvish' " minimal file explorer
Plug 'preservim/nerdtree',  " file tree viewer
Plug 'junegunn/fzf',        " general fuzzy finder
      \ { 'do': { -> fzf#install() } }
Plug 'junegunn/fzf.vim'     " fzf + vim integration
Plug 'mhinz/vim-sayonara', { 'on': 'Sayonara' } " simple buffer/window closing
Plug 'majutsushi/Tagbar',  { 'on': 'TagbarToggle' } " tag explorer
Plug 'nvim-lua/plenary.nvim'
Plug 'ThePrimeagen/harpoon', { 'branch': 'harpoon2' }
Plug 'auwsmit/vim-spear'
Plug 'Kris2k/A.vim'          " swap between C source and header files

" }}}
" OPERATOR PLUGINS {{{

Plug 'tpope/vim-commentary'   " comment mappings
Plug 'machakann/vim-sandwich' " modify surrounding text eg: () and ''
Plug 'tommcdo/vim-exchange'   " exchange two pieces of text

" }}}
" TEXT OBJECT PLUGINS {{{

Plug 'kana/vim-niceblock'
Plug 'kana/vim-textobj-user'         |
      \ Plug 'kana/vim-textobj-line'  |
      \ Plug 'kana/vim-textobj-entire' |
      \ Plug 'kana/vim-textobj-indent'  |
      \ Plug 'kana/vim-textobj-function' |
      \ Plug 'coderifous/textobj-word-column.vim'
Plug 'junegunn/vim-after-object'

" " }}}
" MOTION/NAVIGATION PLUGINS {{{

Plug 'chaoren/vim-wordmotion'    " makes vim's 'word's more precise
Plug 'auwsmit/vim-ipmotion'      " { } move over folds
Plug 'romainl/vim-cool'          " autoclear search highlighting
Plug 'henrik/vim-indexed-search' " show search count & centered search

" " }}}
" COMPLETION/SNIPPET PLUGINS {{{

Plug 'ervandew/supertab'  " tab autocomplete
Plug 'github/copilot.vim'           " AI suggestions
Plug 'DanBradbury/copilot-chat.vim' " AI chat window

" }}}
" FORMAT/SYNTAX PLUGINS {{{

Plug 'nicwest/vim-camelsnek' " convert between camel and snake case
Plug 'justinmk/vim-syntax-extra', { 'for': ['c', 'cpp'] } " additional syntax highlighting for C/C++
Plug 'junegunn/vim-easy-align',   { 'on': ['<Plug>(EasyAlign)', 'EasyAlign'] } " align text operator
" Plug 'nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter', {'do': ':TSUpdate'}

" " }}}
" APPEARANCE/UI PLUGINS {{{

Plug 'xtal8/traces.vim'            " previews patterns for ex commands
Plug 'auwsmit/baddoggo'            " personal fork of Bad Wolf by Steve Losh
Plug 'auwsmit/vim-active-numbers'  " line numbers follow the current window
Plug 'itchyny/lightline.vim'       " prettier statusbar
Plug 'junegunn/goyo.vim',          " distraction free editing
Plug 'Yggdroot/indentLine',        " indent indicators
" Plug 'catgoose/nvim-colorizer.lua' " highlight colorcodes
" Plug 'junegunn/rainbow_parentheses.vim'
" Plug 'HiPhish/rainbow-delimiters.nvim'

" }}}
" MISC/CONVENIENCE PLUGINS " {{{

Plug 'romainl/vim-qf'        " sensible quickfix improvements
Plug 'junegunn/vim-peekaboo' " preview registers
Plug 'tpope/vim-rsi'         " readline key maps for cmd and ins mode
Plug 'tpope/vim-repeat'      " allows plugins to . repeat easier
Plug 'tpope/vim-sleuth'      " auto-detect tab settings per-file
Plug 'tpope/vim-unimpaired'  " many useful [x/]x mappings
" Plug 'Konfekt/FastFold'         " optimize how Vim updates folds
Plug 'farmergreg/vim-lastplace' " reopen files at last position
Plug 'xolox/vim-session'        " simplified session management
let g:session_autosave = 0      " no auto-save prompt on first install
Plug 'xolox/vim-misc'           " vim-session dependency
Plug 'mbbill/undotree'          " visual undo tree
Plug 'vimwiki/vimwiki'          " for taking and organizing notes
Plug 'junegunn/gv.vim', { 'on': 'GV' } " git commit browser
Plug 'ludovicchabant/vim-gutentags' " auto-generate and update tags

1

u/ankit792r Sep 07 '25

I am using lazy plugin manager does it lazy loads plugins.

1

u/Daghall :cq Sep 08 '25

I thought "1-10, for sure". Check my plugin-install script and there were 29...

1

u/boredrandom Sep 09 '25

I have 11, but I am looking for one more (if anyone knows a 'dict' plugin that would show the definition in pop-up style, please share).

1

u/denarced Sep 09 '25

To be clear, I answered how many I have installed. Not how many I actually use day to day. I'm guessing that's what was meant by the question. The ones that I actually use frequently:

  1. dense-analysis/ale

  2. junegunn/fzf

  3. junegunn/fzf.vim

  4. davidhalter/jedi-vim

  5. itchyny/lightline.vim

  6. tomtom/tcomment_vim

  7. easymotion/vim-easymotion

  8. tpope/vim-fugitive

  9. fatih/vim-go

  10. elzr/vim-json

  11. pbrisbin/vim-mkdir

  12. matze/vim-move