Vim Kung-Fu

It’s almost been a year, I have grown from a mediocre to a novice of Vim. And everyday I am learning something new. Starting from it’s powerful mapping tool to it’s ubiquitous plugging which makes it as world’s best IDE (according to me), Vim has been able to survive the ice age along with few reptiles. With many modern text editors with fancy features threatening it’s existence, Vim has been able to maintain it’s fab amongst it’s dedicated fans and followers.

Here are list of plug-ins and tools I use in Vim and I would like to share in this post.

Pathogen

Pathogen helps to manage all the plugins. Here’s a way to install Pathogen in your system

Installation

mkdir .vim

git clone git://github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen.git pathogen

mv pathogen/autoload ~/.vim/autoload

Now edit your .vimrc and add following lines to the top

call pathogen#runtime_append_all_bundles()

call pathogen#helptags()

Now any plugins you want to intall, you can simply copy to ~/.vim/bundle

DelimitMate

DelimitMate provides automatic closing of quotes, parenthesis, brackets, etc. It’s something that will make you lazy and helps you sometimes to save some braincells.

Installation

cd ~/.vim

git submodule add git://github.com/Raimondi/delimitMate.git bundle/delmitmate

git submodule init && git submodule update

Usage

:help delimitMate

NERDCommenter

It provides bunch of key mapping for very fast and efficient code commenting

Installation

cd ~/.vim
git submodule add git://github.com/scrooloose/nerdcommenter.git bundle/nerdcommenter
git submodule init && git submodule update

Usage

:help NERDCommenter

Tab to Space

Actually this is not a plugin, but a set of addons to the .vimrc that will do that trick. Add following lines to the ~/.vimrc, which will convert Tabs to the Spaces

set expandtabset

set tabstop=4set

set shiftwidth=4

SuperTab

This is one of best AutoComplete utility I found in ViM

Installation

Download supertab.vba and open it (vim supertab.vba) Source the code using (:so%)

Using Folds

Using Folds is great way to manage your code and apply certain changes to the part of the code. Here’s a man page VIM-Fold ManPage VIM-Fold