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How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)

thoughtbot · talk · Watch on YouTube

Testing, debugging & developer tools

What it is

A thoughtbot meetup talk by Max Cantor on getting most of what popular plugins provide using only built-in Vim features. It covers autocomplete, file jumping, filesystem navigation, build integration and snippets, with slides and a vimrc available.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN treats it as the canonical talk for the case that vanilla Vim goes a long way and plugin dependencies are a burden.

  • 10 people recommended it
  • 10 different months
  • 1 strong recommendations
  • first 2016, last 2025

What HN commenters said

  1. “The thoughtbot series on vim is great.”

    Led to a minimal vimrc leaning on builtins

    farisjarrah, 2021-11 · Strong recommendation · in “Happy birthday Vim (2020)”

  2. “Here are a couple of handy youtube videos”

    Handy video on vim without plugins

    jneumann004, 2016-11 · Recommendation · in “Ask HN: How to improve vim productivity and workflow?”

  3. “There is also quite a good presentation on YouTube by Max Cantor”

    Good presentation on built-in vim capabilities

    wodny, 2017-03 · Recommendation · in “A Good Vimrc (2014)”

  4. “Take at look at this video is you're interested in anything like that.”

    Shows a lighter-weight vim setup

    ultramann, 2017-11 · Recommendation · in “Vim plugins and config walkthrough”

  5. “Max Cantor has a great talk about that on YouTube”

    Vanilla vim approaches to common tasks

    epicide, 2018-06 · Recommendation · in “Vim plugins I use”

  6. “Let's get this out of the way”

    Canonical talk on doing plugin tasks with plain vim

    mhd, 2018-06 · Recommendation · in “Vim plugins I use”

  7. “Supports a minimalist plugin-free vim approach”

    DyslexicAtheist, 2019-03 · Recommendation · in “Coc.nvim – Intellisense Engine for Vim8 and Neovim”

  8. “Also related, How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)”

    Related talk on vanilla vim use

    noud, 2023-07 · Recommendation · in “LazyVim”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: vim, vimrc, editor workflow, plugins, minimalism

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