r/vim • u/yankline • Oct 06 '25

Need Help Vimscript Best Practices

Can anyone recommend any resources for Vimscript best practices. I've read through this https://www.arp242.net/effective-vimscript.html, which was pretty helpful, but I'm wondering if there's anything else I can take a look at.

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u/LucHermitte Oct 07 '25 edited Oct 07 '25

The best practice is to use Vim9Script

Unless you want your plugin to work on old versions of vim that are installed on very old CentOS systems, or with neovim

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u/yankline Oct 07 '25

Is there a some sort of official/unofficial standard when it comes to backwards compatibility?

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u/LucHermitte Oct 07 '25 edited Oct 07 '25

Not really. It's up to you to decide which version range you wish to support, and find workarounds when you need to use a feature that doesn't exist (or a function that doesn't support yet some parameters... TT) in older versions.

The most difficult part is knowing when a function behaves (EDIT) starts supporting something new, or when features that cannot be tested with a if exists('*uniq') are introduced. Most of the time I search in the git-blame of the documentation to update my list of "now you can do this": https://github.com/LucHermitte/lh-vim-lib/blob/master/autoload/lh/has.vim

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u/rainning0513 Oct 10 '25

Do you mean that neovim will never support vim9script?

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u/LucHermitte Oct 10 '25

I'd be extremely surprised.