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5 Awesome Vim Plugins You May Never Have Heard About

December 25, 2018

I've been browsing people's dotfiles recently and found some very cool Vim plugins which I've never seen before.

So I thought I need to spread the word.

Buftabline — buffer list that lives in the tabline

Buftabline
Buftabline

You might have heard that Vim users would rather use buffers instead of tabs, which is a more native way to work with files in Vim. To me, it was always a bit hard though, as I usually want to see the files open in my tab-line and switch between them. Buftabline fixes that.

BTW, I use Ctrl + J/K to switch between buffers. When you see the open buffers in a tab-line it's really convenient.

" Navigate tabs
nnoremap <C-j> :bnext<CR>
nnoremap <C-k> :bprev<CR>

Signify — uses the sign column to show file changes

Signify
Signify

Signify uses the sign column on the left to displays added, modified or removed lines. The closest relative is the Vim-Gitgutter, but I like this one better as it shows how many lines have been changed.

Startify — a fancy start screen

Startify
Startify

Startify is made by the same author (Marco Hinz from Potsdam). It replaces your start screen with a bit more interesting screen with a citation, recently used files, bookmarks, and sessions. Honestly, after using it for some time I don't find it particularly handy, but I guess it's better than nothing.

And while we are here I also want to mention a F.A.Q. repo on Vim by the same author, it is really good.

GV – A Git Commit Browser

gv.vim
gv.vim

GV.vim is a nice little plugin by Junegunn Choi who you probably know as an author of FZF and Vim-plug. With this plugin, you can type :GV command to see the history of commits in the current repository. Then you can open any commit and see what's been changed in a split view.

Splitjoin – Toggle between single-line and multi-line expressions

Splitjoin
Splitjoin

Splitjoin allows you to easily split between single-line expressions and multi-line. This I think is especially important in ruby, but this plugin supports many other languages including HTML, JavaScript, Python and others.

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