Learn Vim Fast: Useful Plug-ins

Now that we've learned quite a bit about Vim, from the basics to movement and editing, it's time to really put Vim to work for us by extending it with some very useful plug-ins. Vim is an extensible editor, and a vast array of plug-ins are available to make Vim even more powerful for editing code quickly and efficiently. We'll take a look at some of the most useful plug-ins and how they can accelerate your coding even further, but first we need a way to efficiently manage all of these new plug-ins. Not surprisingly, a plug-in manager is available for just this purpose.

Learn Vim Fast: Editing at Speed

So far we've learned some absolute basics of using Vim, customized Vim to make it a little better for everyday coding, and gotten comfortable moving around quickly in a file. If you've stuck it out and practiced the movement and editing commands we've covered so far, you are probably starting to get a sense of the potential that Vim has. With a small set of one letter commands, you can get an awful lot done, and if you've practiced enough to make your use of the commands automatic, you can get stuff done wickedly fast.

It's time to shift into high gear and round out our Vim skills with a more complete set of editing functions. We don't want to always have to enter Insert Mode to make changes to our code. Sometimes we need to move large chunks of code around, change a bunch of variable names, or delete irrelevant code. These code editing tasks would be painful if we had to do them all in Insert Mode, but they can be positively trivial with Vim's powerful editing commands.