I'm disappointed by how much hate there is for plugin-less vim.
The rest of us get along fine (and have for many years thanks) without your new-fangled hoos-its, or even old-fangled hoo-zits. Chirping about how useless vim is without your nerdsboggler jim-crickey is a little... yeccch.
The author of the article is right when he notes elsewhere in this thread that one should learn vim from the ground up. If one does so, one may just find not much climbing is required to get pretty damned high.
My 15 year old vimrc file has 52 lines.
Now i'm going to pop my monocle and ear-horn back in and get back to what I was doing.
Just wait until someone names a whizbang plugin "nerdsboggler-jimcrickey.vim" out of sheer spite!
Nowadays I do load a few plugins myself on the machines where I do a lot of coding or writing, but the only one that's useful every single day without fail is Tim Pope's Surround [1]. It's so useful so often that I've often thought Bram should simply ask to make it part of Vim's core to supplement the very cool idea of text objects [2]. Even if you're a crotchety old raw-Vim man, I really would say that you've got to try this out.
There are other very good plugins out there. Fugitive [3], also by Tim Pope, comes to mind if you do a lot of Git work and care about crafting really nice commits.
I agree with you, and my Vim setup is loaded with plugins.
The power of Vim is, first and foremost, Vim. A good set of plugins is simply for augmenting Vim and/or tailoring it to your desired workflow.
The plugins I use could be broken up into groups. The first group are the ones that add truly valuable core functionality to Vim. This is the smallest group of plugins by far. I consider the "fuzzy finder" plugins to be in this group (Command-T is the one I use). These plugins add meaningful, widely-applicable functionality to the editor.
Then, there are the ones that are convenience plugins. An example is ack-vim. It lets me run ack from within Vim, and provides the ability to jump directly to files in the result list. I am, of course, perfectly capable of running ack in my terminal. But this makes using ack slightly more convenient.
Next are purely aesthetic ones, like colorschemes. Not important, but pleasant.
Finally, there are the updated language configurations - the things that provide language-specific syntax highlighting, indention, and so on. Vim already comes bundled with these. Adding them as plugins simply allows you to pull the very latest versions of them. Nice to keep these up-to-date, but unless your Vim build is old, you'll already have pretty recent versions of these.
I would miss these plugins if I could never use them again, but when I use a different editor, I rarely find myself missing plugins, but I find myself missing core Vim very badly.
You don't have to use plugins if they don't do anything you need. Conversely, there is no reason not to use plugins if they do useful things for you. There is no productivity to be gained from simply refusing to use any plugins.
vim's customizability is one of its strongest assets, I have to question the frequently occurring meme that it is somehow unsafe or questionable to actually use it.
The rest of us get along fine (and have for many years thanks) without your new-fangled hoos-its, or even old-fangled hoo-zits. Chirping about how useless vim is without your nerdsboggler jim-crickey is a little... yeccch.
The author of the article is right when he notes elsewhere in this thread that one should learn vim from the ground up. If one does so, one may just find not much climbing is required to get pretty damned high.
My 15 year old vimrc file has 52 lines.
Now i'm going to pop my monocle and ear-horn back in and get back to what I was doing.