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Vim Plugins

The Popular Choices section contains Vim plugin needs where one representative gather more than 2.5k stars on GitHub. It comes together with graphs showing the evolution of the number of stars on GitHub to easily identify the trends.

The My Recommendations section contains Vim plugins that I appreciate very much.

Popular Choices

Plugin-Manager (34.7)

• Vim-Plug
• Vundle
• Vim-Pathogen

Code Completion (25.6)

• YouCompleteMe
• Coc.nvim [My favorite]

Git (20.5)

• Vim-Fugitive
• Vim-GitGutter

File Browser (19.8)

• NerdTree
• Vim-Vinegar
• Vim-Enuch
• Vim-Fern

Status Line (17.9)

• Vim-Airline
• PowerLine
• LightLine

Fuzzy Finding (17.1)

• Fzf.vim
• Ctrlp.vim
• Skim
• Vim-Clap [My favorite on Windows]

Color Schemes (14.3)

• Gruvbox
• Vim-Colors-Solarized
• Onedark
• Molokai
• Everforest
• Papercolor-Theme

Linting (13.7)

• ALE
• Syntastic

Parenthesis (13.7)

• Vim-Surround
• Auto-Pairs

AI (9.6)

• Copilot.vim
• Codeium.vim

Note Taking (9.0)

• VimWiki

Multiple Cursors (8.0)

• Vim-Visual-Multi

Marks (7.6)

• Vim-Signature
• Vim-Bookmarks

Snippet (7.6)

• UltiSnips
• Emmet-vim

Motion (7.6)

• Vim-Easymotion
• Vim-Sneak
• Clever-F
• Quick-Scope

Tag List (6.2)

• TagBar
• Vim-Gutentags

Debugging (6.1)

• Vimspector

Keybinding (6.0)

• Vim-Which-Key

Code Commenting (6.0)

• Vim-Commentary
• NerdCommenter

Language Support (5.6)

• Vim-Polyglot

Go (16.0)

• Vim-Go

Python (5.5)

• Python-Mode

TeX (5.5)

• VimTeX

Rust (4.0)

• Rust

Read Eval Print Loop (REPL) (4.0)

• Codi.Vim
• Jupyter-Vim [My favorite]

Dashboard (5.4)

• Vim-Startify

Terminal Integration (4.6)

• Vim-Floaterm
• Neoterm

Zen (4.6)

• Goyo

Align (4.6)

• Vim-Easy-Align
• Tabular

Undo Tree (4.1)

• UndoTree
• gUndo

Indent (4.1)

• IndentLine
• EditorConfig
• Vim-Indent-Guides
• Vim-Sleuth

Databases (3.7)

• Vim-DadBod

Learning (3.6)

• Hardmode

Formatting (3.5)

• Vim-Autoformat
• Vim-Prettier

TODO (3.2)

• Todo.Txt-Vim

Search in Files (3.1)

• Ack.vim
• Ctrlsf.vim [My favorite]

Test (3.1)

• Vim-Test
• Vader.Vim

Indicators (2.7)

• Vim-Signify

Asynchronous Execution (2.7)

• Vim-Dispatch
• AsyncRun

Context (2.7)

• Context

Text Objects (2.6)

• Targets

Folding (2.6)

• FastFold
• Vim-Anyfold

My Recommendations

Vim-HighlightedYank

Shortly highlight the text you just yank (copy). It gives you confidence to yank without first selecting.

Wilder

Improves the Vim command completion menu:

Shows the completion alternatives in a vertical menu:

Traces

Visualize the result of the substitution while you are typing it. It helps you identifying the mistakes you do when using the regular expression.

Vim-Visual-Star-Search

Extend the * search to the visual selection. Useful if you need to search text containing spaces or punctuation.

Vim-Rooter

Automatically change the Vim current directory to the root of the corresponding project. It helps in the usage of make, grep and various plugin like NERDTree, fugitive, Coc, LSP integration in general.

Unimpaired

Add additional [ mappings recommended by Tim Pope.

Vim-Signature

Add a sign in the margin to visualize where the marks are.

UndoTree

Gives you easy access to the full Vim undo tree. Help you recovering the version of the file you want (even when you didn’t commit it)

Context

Make sure the context lines (class name, function name, if, for) related to the cursor line remains visible:

Vim-AnyFold

Introduces fold based on indentation.

It allows you to see your full script at glance:

Vim-Remotions

Make it possible to repeat motions or actions behind edition (.), substitution (&) or command (@:) repetition.

Remarks

There are a lot of plugins. VimAwesome mentions about 19.000. I follow about 1.700.

My review is based on months of collecting plugins via blogs but also via plugin directories:

• vimawesome
• vimcolorscheme
• neovimcraft
• trending Neovim plugins

I have restricted the list (but not the graphs) to the plugins that supports both Vim and Neovim.

Last update: 2025-04-03