--- title: Some vimrc and vimrc.bundles config tips l slug: some-vimrc-and-vimrc-bundles-config-tips-l published_at: 2021-07-30 14:00:19 +0000 updated_at: 2026-03-04 20:14:01 +0000 summary: description: You'll get a look at my vimrc and plugins I use with vim. tags: [cjav_dev, web development tutorials, web development for beginners, vim, ruby, rails, javascript, vimrc, vimrc.bundles] views: 1167 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/some-vimrc-and-vimrc-bundles-config-tips-l youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM2j_fssDuM youtube_id: tM2j_fssDuM embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/tM2j_fssDuM thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/tM2j_fssDuM/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Some vimrc and vimrc.bundles config tips l *Published: July 30, 2021* *Views: 1167* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM2j_fssDuM) [![Some vimrc and vimrc.bundles config tips l](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/tM2j_fssDuM/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM2j_fssDuM) ## Description You'll get a look at my vimrc and plugins I use with vim. ## Transcript hey what's up welcome back in this episode i wanted to show you how i use uh vim and how i have set up vim rc and my vim bundles and uh just yeah take a look at the tools that i'm using so i'm gonna open up item this is the terminal application that i prefer and we'll open up our uh vimrc file here this is where you configure vim and uh at the starting at the very top we'll kind of just go through all the different settings here the first one is to map my leader key to space you've got two thumbs they're right there on the space bar when you're on the home row and it's really easy to reach the space bar plus any other key on the keyboard and so i've got that set up with my leader key here's a bunch of other settings that i use that are really common and then i also load my vimrc.bundles from another file so i keep my plugins all organized inside of another file so let's go take a look at that so here's my vmrc.bundles and at the very top i use plug so i'm using a vimplugged or bundle or whatever to manage my plugins fcf is a tool for fuzzy finding files um that allows you to say like control p and then start typing application controller and then jumping right into the application controller so that can be really handy this mark weber tomtom these are two dependencies of vim snipmate and vim snippets so vim snippets are the tools that i use for auto expanding chunks of code this is actually my own fork of the vim snippets plug-in and so we can actually take a look here if you go into like vim plug vim snippets snippets and then any language so we can actually just like look at this um there's a giant list of languages here and so the languages that i'm most commonly writing is like ruby or rails or um you know there's a there's a number that i have added my own snippets to so if we jump into the ruby snippets file here and just open up one example snippet for post this makes it so that i can say post and then hit tab and it'll auto complete this code and it'll sort of like add a placeholder here for me so if i actually just say like sinatra rb and then type post and hit tab then i can say like oh my route is you know this is going to be the create thing route right um that that makes it really handy so i can write my own snippets for things that i'm uh for blocks of code that i'm writing all the time um so that is vim snippets let's see uh after snippets we have our commenting this is so you can say like gcc and that comments out a line you can also like select several lines and say gc and that will comment those out nerd tree is the sort of like file explorer thing that i have on the left that's what that plugin is for ag.vim makes it so that i can like grep for things so i can do colon ag and then type in some word that i want to find so application controller or something and that will search through and find all the files that have application controller and allows you to sort of just jump directly into those so if i wanted to i can just jump right into that application controller for the stitch play rails app that we were experimenting with yesterday let's see what else we got vim polyglot this i think does syntax highlighting i used to use syntastic but this is just another option vimtest makes it so that i can run tests for many different languages directly from the editor it's similar to vim rspec which i used to use before this is a tool from thoughtbot for running our specs but vim test is like a little bit more generic and lets me run both like jest tests and you know jasmine tests and also r spec or mini tester really it's been useful for many many different um testing frameworks so vim test is great one dark is my color scheme vim rails is just a set of helpful things from moving around inside of a rails application and below here i have a bunch that are commented out that sometimes i'll enable sometimes i won't but oftentimes i want to try to keep the number of plugins that i have enabled really small so that vim stays really snappy the more plugins that you add the more sort of like bulk and overhead you have so things start to slow down and i want everything to be moving real quickly all right so if we jump back into vimarcy let's keep going so that's the that's the bundles here's where i set the color scheme we've got some colors some more color stuff setting some more basic settings here around spaces and tabs and then next up i've got a bunch of commands for automatically formatting depending if i'm in like a css file html file javascript file i can just do command uh yeah control f and that will use one of these built-in formatters i think i'm using this less and less because prettier is autoformatting a lot of stuff for me now then here i have like where i set up my preferred tabs and spaces for each of these different languages i've set html as the file type for when i'm working in php or ejs or html.erb or blade or js.rbi set to javascript this is so that those snippets those um snip mate snippets for like html.snippets work in all these other languages so that i can just write like really common html snippets that will also work in my php files or my erb files uh some more color stuff this um displaying extra white space can be handy if you open up a file and there's a bunch of these in it then you can like sort of visually see oh look there's trailing white spaces on that line and we'll talk about how to remove those in just a bit again we have a g that can be handy we've got nerd tree of opening and closing control p for fcf so control p is that thing i we showed before i just do control p and then it opens up this sort of like thing where i can type ahead um and it will drill down into uh file paths that have those names almost every editor is going to have some equivalent to control p so even if you're not using vim if you're in vs code if you're in visual studio for mac or sublime or text mate or any of these are going to have some way to like really quickly jump to a list of files that you fuzzy find or fuzzy search for and that can really speed up your workflow so if you're if you're kind of hunting and pecking around in some navigation tree stop doing that and start using control p because that will immensely speed up your process uh leader f and leader a this is that i can like search everything like get grep basically or grep for everything given this um this the token that's underneath the cursor it's pretty handy some more color stuff so numbers talking about numbers so set number this gives me the line number that i'm on and relative number gives me these numbers that are relative to the line that i'm on so right now this line is line two if i go down one then it's line one if i go down one there's line 121 that is really handy when you're trying to you know move around based on some number of lines if i want to jump up to right above this line i can say 8 j or 8k and that jumps me up 8 j 7 j that jumps me down there's a bunch of different ways to move around but not having to do math and being able to just like look at the number uh look at the line number that is relative and then using that as sort of your uh composable commands where you're saying like do this six times or do this for the next seven lines down or something like that that makes it uh pretty handy let's see what else we got here so leader leader is mapped to control caret and this makes it so that i can swap between two files that i'm working in and uh so if i'm i was i was previously in vmrc.bundles if i hit space space then i jump back to vimarcy if i hit space space i go back to vim or see that bundles so if you're kind of toggling between those two that makes it really easy to work when you're like editing code that's in two different files where you wanted to see like sort of the full screen situation i also use control i and control o to move in and out of a stack so you can say like control i or can this is like control o bring me back bring me back out of the stack and then i can say control i control i control i control i and that'll bring me back into the stack so that's the combination of control o control i and this leader leader is what i use uh all the time vim rspec isn't enabled right now i'm using vim test instead but these are like helpful mappings so i could say a leader e and that will run all the specs or leader t and that will run the current spec file leader s that runs just one spec there's also you can run your rubocop linter again i don't really use these anymore because i'm just using vim test this was a missing import check for python i was writing a ton of django in python a few years ago and i we had like a basically i had like a pre-commit hook that i wanted to check and make sure that i wasn't missing any imports or didn't have any duplicate imports so it's using like the s food checker thing under the hood but that might be handy if you're writing a ton of python again i don't write net a ton inside of them but when i do it's nice to have that runner this is actually just a bash alias that i have locally that will also specify the a path to this like testing library and then these two run the vim test tests and this is what i use all the time for uh for r spec or jest or any of those i just say leader h and that runs the the um the test that's nearest to my cursor leader l that runs the whole file and that's kind of like almost my entire testing process right there um let's see what else we got quicker window movement so this is when you're moving between splits so i if i have a split that's you know a vertical split across here and then a horizontal split across there i can just use i can hold down the control key and then just use all of those same keys that are on my home row that i would use to move around character by character within a certain within a single buffer i can now use those same commands holding down control to move around the um the splits or the different windows that i have open that can be super handy especially when combined with tmux i don't have my tmx set up right now but if you have tmuk splits you can also configure your tmek your tmux config so that you can move from them into tmux tmux splits so you might have like vim splits and tmux splits all on the same screen and you can move between them with these same commands makes it really handy and really intuitive what else we got um this is just deconflicting some snip mate stuff uh strip trailing white space so this the further we get down to the bottom of this vimar c2 the older this is so some of this stuff i've had for many many years trim trailing white space so every time i open a file if there's white space in the file it's sort of uh annoying and also can cause a lot of like churn inside of git so i just have something that says anytime i save so i'm going to do colon w it will automatically strip out those new lines so that i don't end up with any new lines or i'm sorry any white space at the end of a line uh ever that's pretty handy um let's see what else we got spell um okay so these are these are really common oops commands so when i do when i hold down the shift key and hit colon to write a command out i find that it is challenging for me to like really quickly lift my pinky and so i will very commonly accidentally write either a the capital or like i will keep like shift held down for one or two letters after and so instead of just writing wq or w or q or trying to like retrain my brain to always lift my pinky uh i've just made like aliases for all of these um yeah mistakes so yeah if i'm doing like holding down colon or holding down shift i hit colon lift up colon and then as soon as i hit w i might not have already lifted up my pinky and so this can be handy leader leader slash and leader tack i use for for vertically splitting and horizontally splitting the slash key when you look on your keyboard the slash key actually is also the pipe which is the vertical bar and so i kind of think of that as like tack being the horizontal and the pipe being the vertical and so that's like really easy for me to to remember okay like spacebar spacebar pipe is going to give me a vertical split spacebar tack is going to give me or spacebar dash is going to give me a horizontal split i don't actually use this bottom one very much i'm going to take that out okay so then the the rest of the file here is for copying and pasting to and from them so this can be kind of challenging but on mac you can say like uh pb copy is a command on mac underlying that allows you to copy some text so here i'm just like i have the two commands for cutting and copying and just copying onto the clipboard so that i can paste in some other application and then similarly if i have copied something onto the clipboard and i want to paste it into a vim buffer it's surprisingly weird you have to kind of like remap a bunch of a bunch of stuff so that you can sort of like paste it you have to like turn on pasting paste it and then turn off pasting it's it is what it is so that is my vim config my environment config i will share also a gist with links to the different files here so that you can take a look at those i have like a dot files repo but i made it private it's just so nasty there's tons and tons of craft in there i will probably make a new like cut a new version of that which i do maybe like every three or four years soon just so i can clean stuff up and keep it keep everything moving quickly and yeah so hopefully that's useful and we'll see you next time you --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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