It’s been a while since I’ve provided an update on my Vim configuration. A lot has changed in the intervening 7 years.

The following provides a comprehensive walk-through of my Vim configuration and plugins that I use.

Configuration

My full Vim configuration file is here.

Plugins

Plugin Manager

vim-plug

vim-plug is a minimalist and fast plugin manager for Vim and Neovim. As of 2025, vim-plug remains the most widely-used plugin manager across Vim and Neovim, thanks to its speed, ease of use, and robust features.

Language

ale

ALE (Asynchronous Lint Engine) is a popular Vim plugin that provides real-time linting and fixing capabilities.¹ ALE is particularly popular because it brings modern IDE-like features to Vim while maintaining the editor’s philosophy of being fast and customizable.²

vim-go

vim-go is a popular Vim plugin that provides comprehensive Go development support within Vim. It’s designed to make Vim feel like a full-featured IDE for Go programming.³

tabular

Tabular is a popular Vim plugin for text alignment and formatting. It’s designed to help you align text in columns, making it easier to create well-formatted tables, code, and other structured text.⁴

vim-markdown

vim-markdown is a Vim plugin that enhances Markdown editing by adding features that are not available in Vim by default.

vim-polyglot

vim-polyglot is a language pack plugin for Vim and Neovim that bundles syntax highlighting, indentation, and filetype detection for hundreds of programming and markup languages—all in one plugin.

Completion

auto-pairs

auto-pairs is a popular Vim plugin that automatically inserts or deletes brackets, parentheses, and quotes in pairs.

YouCompleteMe

YouCompleteMe (YCM) is a popular code completion engine for Vim. It provides fast, intelligent autocompletion for multiple programming languages.⁵

Code Display

gruvbox

Gruvbox is a popular retro-inspired colorscheme for Vim and other text editors. It’s designed with warm, earthy tones that are easy on the eyes for long coding sessions.

Integrations

vim-gitgutter

vim-gitgutter is a popular Vim plugin that visually integrates Git diff information with the buffer’s gutter (i.e., the sign column to the left of the line numbers).

fzf

fzf is a general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder. It helps you quickly search and select items from a list using a fast, interactive fuzzy search interface. It’s written in Go and works in any Unix-like terminal environment.⁶

fzf.vim

fzf.vim wraps fzf functionality into Vim commands and key mappings.

gundo.vim

gundo.vim is a Vim plugin (originally by Steve Losh) that provides a visual interface for navigating Vim’s powerful but complex undo tree.

vim-test

vim-test is a popular Vim plugin that provides a unified interface for running tests from various testing frameworks directly within Vim. It’s designed to work across multiple programming languages and testing tools.

Interface

NERDTree

NERDTree is a popular file system explorer plugin for the Vim text editor. It provides a tree-style navigation panel that displays your project’s directory structure in a sidebar, making it easier to browse and manage files without leaving Vim.

nerdtree-git-plugin

nerdtree-git-plugin is an extension for NERDTree that shows Git status flags for files and directories directly in the file tree.

vim-airline

vim-airline is a lightweight status/tabline plugin for Vim that enhances the appearance and functionality of the default statusline.

vim-airline-themes

vim-airline-themes is a companion plugin to vim-airline that provides a large collection of predefined color themes specifically for the airline statusline.

Commands

vim-commentary

vim-commentary is a popular Vim plugin created by Tim Pope that provides simple and intuitive commenting functionality. It allows you to easily comment and uncomment lines or blocks of code in various programming languages.

vim-fugitive

vim-fugitive is a popular Vim plugin by Tim Pope that provides comprehensive Git integration directly within Vim.

vim-repeat

vim-repeat is a foundational Vim plugin by Tim Pope that enhances Vim’s built-in . (dot) command to work properly with plugin-defined operations.

vim-surround

vim-surround is one of Tim Pope’s most popular Vim plugins that provides easy manipulation of “surroundings” - parentheses, brackets, quotes, XML tags, and more.

vim-easy-align

vim-easy-align is a Vim plugin by Junegunn Choi that provides powerful and intuitive text alignment capabilities. It makes it easy to align text around delimiters like =, ,, :, |, and more.

Other

vim-sensible

vim-sensible is a foundational Vim plugin by Tim Pope that provides a minimal set of sensible default settings for Vim. It’s designed to be a starting point that most Vim users would find reasonable, without being opinionated about more subjective preferences.

vitality.vim

vitality.vim is a Vim plugin (primarily by Steve Losh) designed to improve the integration between Vim and terminal multiplexers, particularly tmux and screen. It addresses various issues that arise when running Vim inside these terminal environments.