Turn Vim into a Full‑Featured IDE: Plugins, Tips, and Color Schemes

Introduction

Vim is praised as the "god of editors" while Emacs is called the editor of gods; both are highly extensible, and even Sublime Text is mentioned as a good option. A good product should be lightweight, plugin‑driven, and freely customizable, which makes Vim an ideal candidate for transformation into a unique, powerful editor or even an IDE.

Discussion Highlights

1. Try the vgod vimrc, which includes many basic plugins.

2. Explore "Vim as an IDE" by searching online; two popular GitHub repositories are use_vim_as_ide (by a Chinese developer) and vim-as-an-ide (by an overseas developer).

3. YouCompleteMe (YCM) is a smart completion plugin. Vim plugin configuration can be done manually or with managers such as Vundle or Pathogen, allowing incremental addition of plugins.

4. The vim-as-an-ide setup follows a simple three‑step process: run Vim, execute

:PluginInstall

, then quit with

:qall

.

About Vim Color Schemes

Recommended schemes include Solarized, Molokai, and PHD. Themes are categorized as Dark or Light; Solarized offers both, while Molokai is Dark. To create a custom scheme, you can reference colors from your favorite IDE and use a color picker, but be aware of terminal color differences that may affect the final appearance.

References

https://github.com/vgod/vimrc

https://github.com/liuzheng712/config

https://github.com/yangyangwithgnu/use_vim_as_ide

https://github.com/jez/vim-as-an-ide

https://github.com/tomasr/molokai

https://github.com/Lokaltog/vim-powerline.git