vim

Top 5 Must-Have Vim Plugins You Need to Know

Vim (Vi improved) is one of the most amazing and popular text editors like Visual Studio Code, Notepad++, and Sublime among developers and programmers. It is also useful for writers.

Today we will be sharing some pretty impressive must-have vim plugins to make your vim text editor even more useful and efficient.

  1. NERDTree
  2. Syntastic
  3. Auto pairs
  4. Ack
  5. NERD Commenter

NERDTree

NERDTree is a file system explorer for the Vim editor that lets you explore directories in hierarchies in the form of a tree. It gives you the facility to quickly open files for easy reading or editing using the input devices such as a keyboard or a mouse. The NERDTree is a huge necessity where the huge assortments are required and it can somehow help you remember those filenames.

Syntastic

Syntastic is there to check the syntax for Vim that works through external syntax checkers and then shows you the errors. This can either be done automatically or on the demand as the files are saved. It supports almost all of the development languages. So, you don’t need to worry about the support for the languages you are using. Syntastic is a must for every developer who is learning a new language as this will be of great help when it comes to syntax correction.

Auto Pairs

The Auto pairs is one of the most used Vim plugins and its main purpose is to insert or delete pairs of characters. Those characters include brackets, parenthesis, and quotation marks. Auto pairs is a useful plugin for programmers as the programming languages use quite a lot of characters.

ACK

The Ack is one of the most adored Vim plugins as this acts as a search tool that is required by all programmers. This comes in handy when the user wants to search a specific line or a word. It also supports a split window where you can see everything side by side. Ack is a great plugin for programmers as they require to see the related text across different files. Due to its split window, the user’s productivity is increased and time is saved which makes it more efficient.

NERD Commentor

The NERD Commentor comes into play when it is hard to understand the code and you need to remember what you are doing and want to write it right below the code. The NERD Commentor helps you do that. It helps the users to comment on a single line, multi-line, or partial line. NERD Commentor is quite helpful for programmers who are new to the field or who want to remember what they did and where they did it.

Final words

The Vim plugins are there to enhance the Vim Editor. This is why it is considered one of the best. Due to the huge number of Vim plugins, it enhances one’s productivity and makes it more efficient to work with. We discussed the top must-have Vim plugins and briefly described what they are and what they can do.

About the author

Karim Buzdar

Karim Buzdar holds a degree in telecommunication engineering and holds several sysadmin certifications. As an IT engineer and technical author, he writes for various web sites. He blogs at LinuxWays.