Top 10 Vim Plugins to Bring IDE Features to Your Editor

If you have written any code, you know how convenient an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) can be. Whether it's Java, C, or Python, when an IDE helps you check syntax, compile in the background, or automatically import the libraries you need, coding becomes much easier. Additionally, if you work on Linux, you also know how convenient Vim is for text editing. So, you might want to get these IDE features in Vim as well.

In fact, there are few ways to achieve this. Some people might try to turn Vim into a C language IDE, such as c.vim; others integrate Vim into Eclipse with Eclim. But what I want to tell you is a more general solution that only uses plugins. You definitely don't want your editor to become bloated by installing too many panels and features. A plugin-only solution allows you to only choose the features you want to integrate into Vim. An additional benefit of doing this is that this IDE is not specific to any one language, allowing you to write any type of code. Let's look at my top 10 plugins for bringing IDE features into Vim.

First, not everyone may be familiar with Vim plugins and know how to install them. So, the first plugin I recommend is Pathogen, because this plugin will make it easier to install other plugins. If you want to install other plugins not listed here, using Pathogen will become very simple. Its official documentation is very good, so go download and install it. Installing other plugins will also become much easier.

We get used to IDEs for the first reason: their auto-completion feature. So, I like this very convenient SuperTab plugin that gives the Tab key 'superpowers'.

If you need to program in more than one language, it's sometimes very easy to confuse the syntax between different languages. Fortunately, syntastic will help you check and tell you whether you should add parentheses or brackets, or tell you that you forgot a semicolon somewhere.

Another thing that drives programmers crazy is: Did I forget the last parenthesis?! Everyone hates using their fingers to count those distant parentheses. To handle this, I use the Auto Pairs plugin, which automatically inserts and formats brackets and parentheses.

If you're looking for a shortcut key to comment code that supports multiple programming languages, you can try NERD Commenter. Even if you're not a programmer, I highly recommend this plugin because it will make commenting on bash scripts or anything else very efficient.

Every programmer knows that good coders write code, but great coders reuse code. Snipmate can easily insert code snippets into your files, greatly reducing the number of keystrokes you need. It includes many code snippets for various languages by default, and you can also very easily add your own.

When managing a large project, it's a very good idea to spread your code across different files. It's also a basic coding principle. NERDTree is a nice file browser that you can use directly in Vim, allowing you to always think of all the files.

To create a file browser that supports opening multiple files simultaneously, nothing is more important than a good buffer manager. MiniBufferExplorer can complete this task very beautifully and efficiently. It even sets different colors and switching shortcuts for your buffers.

When you have multiple files open simultaneously, it's easy to forget what you've added to those files. To prevent you from forgetting, the Tag List code viewer will display the variables and functions in a nice, concise format.

For those of us who like to undo, redo, then undo certain changes again, and then view the entire editing process based on these, undotree is a nice plugin that can show your undo and redo history in the form of a tree. This feature has nothing to do with code, so it's one of my favorite plugins.

Finally, but not least importantly, everyone needs a debugger at some point. If you like gdb, then gdbmgr is for you, because it integrates that famous debugger into Vim.

In summary, whether or not you're a crazy coder, it's always very convenient to have some extra Vim features at hand. As I mentioned in the introduction, if you don't need them, you don't have to install all these plugins. Or you can install others if you want; these are actually just a basic entry-level set of plugins.