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

14 comments from Hacker News

1. @farisjarrahNov 2021· in “Happy birthday Vim (2020)”

   The thoughtbot series on vim is great. I'm really glad I found this video early in my Vim career. I've got a very minimal vimrc as a result and just try to lean into the vim builtins this video

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2. @wodnyMar 2017· in “A Good Vimrc (2014)”

   I don't believe it's possible to have a good vimrc without really grasping some elementary concepts like movements, operators, registers, windows etc. I have recently watched all the Drew Neil's VimCasts[1] and after just a couple of hours I've realized I was missing a lot for at least 10 years. There is also quite a good presentation on YouTube by Max Cantor "How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)"[2]. Instead of treating a single vimrc as the best one it's useful to skim through dotfiles and plugins of some influential vim users like Drew Neil[3] and Tim Pope[4]. BTW VimCasts are accompanied by a book. The second edition[5] includes changes introduced by Vim 8.0. [1]: [LINK] [2]: this video [3]: [LINK] [4]: [LINK] [5]: [LINK]

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3. @gregjorFeb 2025· in “Ask HN: Alternative to VS Code?”

   > The ability to autocomplete, and navigate through the code (even my dependencies's code) by the click on a function, the popover showing the documentation/signature of the function i'm going to call. Those are Quality of Life features I'm not ready to give up on. ctags did most of that decades ago. Plain vim has good autocomplete and signature popovers, along with navigating to functions and class definitions. No LSP needed. An LSP will do it better but with sometimes significant overhead. As I noted I don't use VSCode or a JetBrains IDE. I know about them and have used them. My setup works language-agnostic, and I also work in multiple languages. Possibly useful, at least interesting: this video

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4. @skydhashApr 2025· in “OpenVSX, which VSCode forks rely on for extensions, down for 24 hours”

   With editors like vim, neovim, emacs, it's way easier to get the lay of the land first (tutorial, play around with the default config,..) and then list out what you need. My vim config has three things only: LSP, FZF (for anything fuzzy), and Plug (to install the above two). There's also a few niceties, but I could do without them. or vendor them into the main config. But it's not my daily editor, so that's just the base config. Anything I could add on top of that would depend on the projects I would need it for. That's about 200 lines (the lsp config is 1/4 of that) NB. A nice talk even if it's about vim "How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)" this video

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5. @DyslexicAtheistMar 2019· in “Coc.nvim – Intellisense Engine for Vim8 and Neovim”

   some languages are more verbose than others. if you're dealing with `ProblemProblemFactory` type of abstraction madness and subscribe to the idea of spelling out every variable (MessageCounter instead of "cnt" etc) then this would seem handy. Maybe it's a question of mindset & philosophy. I personally prefer a minimalist but powerful editor without plugins and just rely on their internal capabilities (which granted are a learning curve). It avoids getting stuck when doing $EDITOR foo on a system you don't own and still feel at home and as fast as on your primary workspace. "How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)" : this video

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