How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)

This is a supplementary repository for my August 3, 2016 talk How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim).

You may also be interested in my Vim cheat sheets:

Basic (Digital | Print):

Advanced (Digital | Print):

Summary

Fuzzy File Search

When moving to another buffer with :b, hit tab to autocomplete, or simply hit Enter to go to the first buffer with a unique match to what you have already typed.

By adding set path+=** and set wildmenu to the vimrc, we are now able to hit Tab when running a :find command to expand partial matches.

Another asterisk (*) can be placed in the query to return fuzzy/partial matches.

Tag jumping

First, download and run ctags in your project directory like this: ctags -R .

Make sure your Vim working directory is in the same directory as the tags file that gets generated.

Now, you are able to use ^] to jump to a tag under the cursor, g^] to get a listing of all matching tags, and ^t to jump back up the tag stack.

Autocomplete

Vim has plenty of ways to do autocomplete. The best is ^n which works out of the box according to the complete option. Use ^p to go back in the suggestion list, ^y to accept the current completion choice, and ^e to cancel out of the autocompletion dialog to return to your text without making a selection.

There are also a number of other autocomplete features prefixed by ^x:

• ^x^n to search within the file
• ^x^f to complete filenames (works with path+=**!)
• ^x^] to complete only tags

And more! :help ins-completion for a full listing.

File Browsing

Vim ships with a builtin file browser called NetRW. To use it, just run :E.

Snippets

Here's an example of a minimal snippet command you can put in your vimrc:

nnoremap ,html :-1read $HOME/.vim/.skeleton.html<CR>

Assuming that your home vim directory contains a text file called .skeleton.html, which contains (for example) an empty HTML document, this mapping will insert a copy of the text file in the current file when you type ,html in normal mode.

Build Integration

See the bottom of no_plugins.vim for an explanation of how to integrate Vim with a simple Ruby RSpec build process (warning: this has not been updated since 2016, so it probably does not work anymore).