 I'm on a bit of a quest to make them my writing tool of choice now anybody who knows me Knows that I'm not a developer or programmer of any type Any of that stuff that I get into is merely me dabbling for fun What I do for a living is I actually write historical papers and I would love to be able to use them to actually write that stuff and I've tried over the years many times to actually do that, but It hasn't been successful, but I've started looking into some plugins and stuff that would actually make it possible for me to do that and I have started going through and making notes and stuff and then by using like them wiki and things like that So today what I thought I'd do is go over five essential plugins for people who are like me who use them Recreationally if that's the right way to put it people who aren't the Vim Gods and goddesses out there who can go through and just do everything like it looks like magic But people who use them and they know how to quit out of them and maybe a few other things But they don't know everything so that's what the purpose of this video is so today I'm going to cover five essential plugins for the everyday Vim user. Let's go ahead and jump in So the first one that I'm going to cover is nerd tree now Really what I'm talking about here Doesn't necessarily mean you have to use this specific plug-in This is the one that I use but there are several out there that are like this and basically what they do is They allow you to bring up a file picker or a file manager right inside of them so that you can change quickly between Files without having to exit Vim go find another file and then go back into Vim and that's what nerd tree does There's one for Ranger. There's one for via them. So basically you use one that you If you're familiar with a file Terminal file manager, you could probably find a Vim plugin for that file manager. Nerd tree is just the one that I use So let me show you how this works So here I am in a Vim buffer and let's just say I wanted to change directories to a different File or something so right now I'm in my Vim plugins file Let's just say I wanted to go to the general settings file for My end Vim config in order to do that and use nerd tree I'd have to use control n and that brings up nerd tree and then I can just navigate using the traditional file structure to where I want to go so I wanted to go to general and General Vim here and that just changes it and then I can quit nerd tree as simple as that It's really quite cool. There are some additional features so it can show you can set key bindings So you it'll take you to a certain directory every time You can use your traditional Vim key bindings in order to go up and down the file tree So, you know capital G will take you to the bottom gg will take you to the top and so on and so forth And then you just obviously you would navigate using hjkl Just like you would in regular Vim you could also use the arrow keys if you're you know a heathen like me And I still sometimes use the arrow keys. It's just it's ingrained in me a little bit, but I'm working on it So that's nerd tree. It's like I said, there are several of them out there that are like that. There's a ranger one. There's via them There's one called like net true or something like that. I'm not really sure what that is I've never used it, but they're all good and that tree is just one that I use The second one I want to talk about is called Vim last place and basically what this does is allows you to reopen files at the last edit position in Vim so let's say you were editing this file here and you're on Line 21 Okay, or on 20 or whatever it doesn't matter and you quit this and then you reopen it up So we're actually have to go into This file here and then into general Vim and it'll actually what them last place place will do is will open up the Vim Buffer in the exact place you left it in this particular file and it saves it for every file It's just part of the buffer that it saves This is essential for me because almost universally if I have to get back into a file like right away I want to be where I was when I left especially in like a config file chances are making some changes in the config file and I don't want to have to go through and actually search for where I was before And I could take you know a lot of time So this allows it just to reopen exactly in the place where you left it There may be a way of doing this without a plug-in. I'm not actually sure This is just what I found and this is what I use. So Yeah, that's them last place the third one I want to talk about is called Vim wiki and Vim wiki is a note-taking tool slash wiki making tool slash markdown tool Thing it's very complex and very powerful and I only scratch the surface of what it can do but and I've actually made a couple of video about it before and I'll link that up in the cards, but Basically what Vim wiki is is it's a note-taking tool. So that's at least that's where I've been using it So if I wanted to access my Vim wiki, I'd have I do leader WS And then I just checked the Vim wiki that I want to use because I have two of them And then it would take me into Vim wiki and I'm not gonna go through all the features of Vim wiki Because like I said, I've made a video about that before but basically this just allows me to create nested Notes and categorize them. However, I want so these are links or whatever two different pages within the Vim wiki and I can just enter them like so and you know Just keep going like this and you know whatever and it leads me to my notes. It's great. Like I said, I've only a very Done very superficial in terms of the power of them wiki. There's a ton of stuff that you can do with it It uses markdown. It has its own weird markdown Contacts, but it's mostly markdown and it's just great if you want to take notes in them I highly recommend Vim wiki the next one. I want to talk about is called go yo now This is mostly a frivolous plug plug in that provides no useful benefit outside of being Way to make it so that when you're writing something you're you have fewer distractions Really, that's all it does It's not something that you absolutely necessarily have to have but I like it because I'm like I said before at the beginning I'm trying to transition into using them for writing and in order to do that I really don't need all the frivolous things that them does and I kind of want my writing to be front and center So let me show you what go yo does So let's just say I'm in this File here again, and I wanted to get rid of the extraneous stuff. So I could just do this by doing Control G is what I have this set up for and basically what that does is it moves everything to the center gets rid of the line Numbers and stuff like that And you can set it up to do pretty much anything because as you can see here in my go yo settings with it if you Once you enter go yo, I can go through and pretty much put any Vim Setting in those things so I could remove syntax highlighting. I could remove the cursor line I could do pretty much whatever I wanted to do So that go yo looked the way I wanted to do look when I'm in it and then when I go back out of go yo I could just go back to my regular Neo Vim or Vim config and that's really cool I haven't done a ton of like formatting of go yo yet, but I can see once I've transitioned into actually using Vim as a you know a writing tool being able to go through and like turn off syntax hiding highlighting turn off You know Auto pairs turn off all these things I could go through and do that and make it just so that just my writing is front and center The final one I want to talk about is called Auto pairs now auto pairs is more of a tool for people who do a lot of coding But if you spend a lot of time in configuration files You might be able to find some use out of this So basically what this does is Whenever you use something that comes in pairs It automatically completes them for you. So let's say you use parentheses It'll automatically provide you an open and closed parentheses as you can see here same thing with curly brackets and same thing with square brackets and same thing with Single quotes and double quotes now the double quotes here and vim are a little bit or in the vim syntax Like when you're in your vim configure a little bit difference because vim uses quotation marks for comments So it'll only give you a single one if you want a second one You kind of have to do it yourself But as you can see there it actually gave me the double pair there. So that's auto pair It's really quite great for when you want to go through and do some edits in your configuration file because most times in a configuration file you'll need A matching pair of something and also prevents you from you know missing one of those things So nothing's more frustrating than getting into like your x-monad configuration file and realizing you're missing a A curly bracket or something because you forgot to do it this way You always have pairs of the things that you need pairs of it's great So those are the five Plugins that I consider pretty much essential for every vim user now There are obviously tons of other vim plugins out there that are really good And it doesn't mean just because I chose these five that those other ones aren't great as well But these are the ones that I use that I use every day Uh that I just probably couldn't use them without and they'll probably end up being more of these as I go through And try to transition to using them more So in the comments below, let me know what vim plugins you consider essential So if you have a Essential plugin that you just have to have let me know and if you're one of those vim purists that don't use plugins at all Shout out in the comments below and tell me why you don't use plugins I'm sure that you'll be able to convince me not to use my beloved plugins That's not gonna happen Anyways, thank you for watching this video. You can follow me on twitter at the linuxcast You can follow me on uh facebook at the linuxcast You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast before I go I'd like to take one to thank my current patrons devon marcus magland donnie spen east coast web mitchell merrick camp and chris Uh, I have this in a different order now because mitchell re-upped Are up till his position a little bit and now they're out of order So it felt really really weird there from those like I did I miss one? No, I didn't. Uh, thanks everybody for your support Thank you for watching. I'll see you next time