Using Vim as my primary IDE

Posted on , updated on by sam Allen

I recently decided to make the switch to VIM as my primary IDE. Any serious developer that uses Linux as their primary OS should be using VIM to edit their code, right? I mean, why not?

The IDE you use is really just a matter of preference. If you want to try out VIM as your IDE then maybe this post will help you, I’ll try to keep it short.

VIM Plugin Management

You will want to find VIM plugins that make developing on VIM easier. But first you need to decide what plugin manager you want to use for VIM. I decided to use vim-plug by junegunn because it was the most highly recomended. There are many other options so do your own research before you decide.

Vim-plug is easy to use, once you have it installed you just need to these two lines in your ~/.vimrc file:

call plug#begin('~/vim/plugged') " -- this is the location where vim-plug should be installed

call plug#end()

Installing plugins with vim-plug is straightforward. You just need to put the github URL of the plugin in between the two lines above prepended by Plug. It would look like this:

call plug#begin('~/vim/plugged') " -- this is the location where vim-plug should be installed

Plug 'scrooloose/nerdtree'       " -- I will explain these plugins in a minute
Plug 'vim-airline/vim-airline'      

call plug#end()

Once you have the lines added then you need to open a new instance of VIM and run :PlugInstall. That will check if there are new plugins in the ~/.vimrc file and install them.

Which Plugins to Use

This is 100% a matter of preference. If you want to go as barebones as possible then you technically don’t need any plugins. I prefer my IDE to have certain functionality such as buffer tabs and xdebug support.

Here are the plugins I am currently using:

More VIM Configurations

There is a multitude of ways to customize VIM to function any way you want. Instead of going into all of the details, I’ll just show you all of the customizations I use.

This is not by any means the best configuration and I will try to post updates as I make changes. Without further ado, here is my ~/.vimrc file:

" ------------------
"       Plugins
" ------------------
call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged')

Plug 'altercation/vim-colors-solarized'
Plug 'bronson/vim-trailing-whitespace'
Plug 'scrooloose/nerdtree', { 'on':  'NERDTreeToggle' }
Plug 'Xuyuanp/nerdtree-git-plugin'
Plug 'ap/vim-buftabline'
Plug 'vim-airline/vim-airline'
Plug 'vim-airline/vim-airline-themes'
Plug 'taglist.vim'
Plug 'junegunn/fzf', { 'dir': '~/.fzf', 'do': './install --all' }
Plug 'junegunn/fzf.vim'
Plug 'joonty/vdebug'
Plug 'airblade/vim-gitgutter'

call plug#end()

" -- solarized personal conf
set background=dark
try
    colorscheme luna
catch
endtry

" -------------------------------
"       Basic Configurations
" -------------------------------

" -- tabwidth set to 4
set tabstop=8 softtabstop=0 expandtab shiftwidth=4 smarttab

" -- highlight 80th column
set colorcolumn=80
highlight ColorColumn ctermbg=0

" -- show line numbers
set number

" -- enable mouse support
set mouse=a

" -- set buffers to hidden for use with tabline
set hidden

" ---------------------
"      Key Mapping
" ---------------------

" -- NERDTree
map <C-n> :NERDTreeToggle<CR>

" -- fuzzy finder
map <C-p> :FZF<CR>

" -- taglist
map <C-t> :TlistToggle<CR>

" -- highlight search matches
map <C-f> :set hlsearch!<CR>

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