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Show HN: Vim Awesome – Vim plugins

222 points by divad12 12y ago

untothebreach 12y ago
56 of them are Tim Pope...damn that guy is prolific http://vimawesome.com/?q=Tim%20Pope http://vimawesome.com/?q=Tim%20Pope
- platz 12y ago
  Shougo is quite prolific as well
  - tobeportable 12y ago
    http://vimawesome.com/?q=Shougo http://vimawesome.com/?q=Shougo
Crito 12y ago
Looks pretty cool. One comment though: when clicking through the categories on the left, I see "x [number]" next to some of the tags, but that number doesn't seem to match the number of plugins that will actually be shown if you click on it. Example: Completion->'deliminators x 3' shows three yellowish plugins, and then three differently colors plugins. What is the significance of the colors? Example: Other->'manager x 3' shows no results.
- divad12 12y ago
  Hi! Thank you for checking this out! The reason for the mis-match between # of plugins and tags count is the tags count only counts plugins with that tag in the category the tag is nested under. I agree this is quite confusing, and should just make the two views consistent. I'll add an issue to GitHub about it. Each category has a distinct color. > Other->'manager x 3' shows no results Oh, we hide plugin mangers right now, so no results are shown. :( Will fix this to be nicer, thanks.
statik_42 12y ago
This is exactly the kind of visually appealing and easily navigable Vim plugin directory I've been searching for ever since I started using it last year. Thank you for sharing, this is fantastic!
- divad12 12y ago
  Thank you! Wanting such a thing is why we built it. :)
- lexalizer 12y ago
  +1. Thank you for the effort you put in.
- DrJ 12y ago
  I guess it's good that my Vundles are basically the top 10. Ha!
googletron 12y ago
I wrote this how do I categorize this? http://vimawesome.com/plugin/numbers-vim http://vimawesome.com/plugin/numbers-vim
- xymostech 12y ago
  Just click the edit button next to "uncategorized", and select a category. You can edit and add tags as well if you'd like.
- lucianp 12y ago
  Numbers is one of my favourite Vim plugins! Looks like you are the author. Thank you so much for writing it!
dpcx 12y ago
This is pretty cool. However, clicking on a plugin takes you to [1] (for example). Clicking on the header there takes you to [2]. This is probably not the intended behaviour. [1]: http://vimawesome.com/plugin/vim-airline-sad-beautiful-tragic http://vimawesome.com/plugin/vim-airline-sad-beautiful-tragi... [2]: http://vimawesome.com/plugin/plugin/vim-airline-sad-beautiful-tragic http://vimawesome.com/plugin/plugin/vim-airline-sad-beautifu...
- divad12 12y ago
  Oops, that's definitely a bug! Issue raised: https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/issues/16 https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/issues/16 Thanks for finding this.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
neduma 12y ago
Great. cool. awesome. so we don't need muck with plug-in help text to read the doc. we can read it here
xer0x 12y ago
awesome
nwh 12y ago
Neat idea, but that website needs some serious contrast. Almost unreadable when scaled.
- chrismorgan 12y ago
  That’s solarized for you… (I never could stand it).
  - swah 12y ago
    I need contrast in the colors so I can turn down contrast and brightness in the monitor.
kasperset 12y ago
Not that it matters but I think this is built using Reactjs.
- chenglou 12y ago
  It does, if you consider that spicyj worked on this and that he's a core React contributor =).
  - divad12 12y ago
    In fact, this was the first React project that he worked on -- he rewrote our old angular app within a week of when React first came out, and had been hooked since.
    - john2x 12y ago
      Cool! Does he have plans to write an article about his experience writing this in React? That would be an interesting read, especially since it's open source.
waitingkuo 12y ago
This is really awesome. And the search bar works well!
shock 12y ago
FWIW, Vundle doesn't use :BundleInstall anymore, it's :PluginInstall. Similarly it's Plugin ".../..." instead of Bundle ".../..."
- divad12 12y ago
  Indeed -- https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/pull/17 https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/pull/17 Thanks for pointing this out to us. Will merge when I get home.
  - shock 12y ago
    You're most welcome. Sorry for not creating a pull request myself, but I was dead tired last night.
- stack_underflow 12y ago
  Also, the new Plugin command doesn't support double quoted string arguments, it gets parsed as a trailing comment. I discovered this after I s//'d my Bundle "<plugin>" lines to Plugin "<plugin>" and received 'Argument required' errors. The fix was to use single quote strings, i.e. Plugin '<plugin>'
johncoltrane 12y ago
Right, because stars on github are a perfect indication that a plugin will work for me.
- kaishiro 12y ago
  Where is it stated that it's a perfect metric for plugin relevancy? Alternatively, what would be a better metric. Any ideas?
  - oinksoft 12y ago
    http://www.vim.org/scripts/script_search_results.php?keywords=&script_type=&order_by=rating&direction=descending&search=search http://www.vim.org/scripts/script_search_results.php?keyword...
    - kaishiro 12y ago
      So we're just trading one measure of popularity with another?
  - johncoltrane 12y ago
    It's the one that is used on that awesome site. A better metric is actually trying all the alternatives.
- divad12 12y ago
  You're right that GitHub stars probably isn't the best metric of how good a plugin is. We try to use a more unbiased metric of relative # of actual users, and this we get by scraping dotfiles repos on GitHub, looking for references to Vim plugins. That's shown as the # users count to the left of stars on GitHub. It's also not perfect, but it's a useful source of relative usage statistics.
  - johncoltrane 12y ago
    My point is two-fold: 1. You can't have real and complete usage statistics so those metrics are at best meaningless and at worst misleading. Also, something being popular doesn't mean that it will fit one's workflow and needs. 2. Choosing a tool because of its perceived (through meaningless/misleading numbers) is not really the smarter way to build-up one's config.
fataliss 12y ago
This is one of the best looking Vim ressource I stumbled upon so far! Finally a little care for something else than raw information. My eyes thank you, creators of vimawesome.
- divad12 12y ago
  Thank you! The color scheme used is Solarized, courtesy of Ethan Schoonover: http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized
lucianp 12y ago
This is awesome indeed! I've just thought of two features that would make it even more awesome. Every plugin could have the following two lists: 1. Known to be incompatible with 2. Frequently installed together with The first list would have to be user-edited, but the second one could theoretically be determined by searching github.
- divad12 12y ago
  Thanks, these are great suggestions! Added two issues: 1. https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/issues/40 https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/issues/40 2. https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/issues/39 https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/issues/39
alexkus 12y ago
I just can't get excited about vim plugins (no matter how good they are, no matter how much I love vi/vim - and no disrespect to their authors). I can imagine how they could increase my productivity (to some extent) but... I'm old school, I work happily with vi, many of the customers I dealt with going back to the mid-90s never gave me a choice. SunOS 4.1.3U5 (ugh). AIX 3. Heady days of Solaris 2.5. Bog standard vi. vim is a bonus, but I'm far from lost when it's just vi. I love macros, but I can still get stuff done if they aren't available. If there's no vi then I'm not lost either, I can work around stuff with awk/sed/etc. Fundamentally I don't want to have to ever install a bunch of stuff in multiple places to create a common environment for myself. That's a big problem that hasn't been solved yet. I just want it to be the same everywhere, which is why I don't rely on zsh or even ksh, and I just go for the bare minimum. I've been to too many customers to know that not being able to do stuff within someone else's environment is really not a good thing. I've seen people escorted off customer sites because they've been ineffectual. But, the biggest takeway is that I've seen too many new employees/interns that are lost without their expected favoured environment, and it's not getting better. vim plugins aside, there's a growing lack of adaptability.
- thenerdfiles 12y ago
  This site could implement an ACL though github accounts and provide centralized, recipe-like plugin and *rc file mashups like alias.sh with an ifttt.com twist.
- gipp 12y ago
  Eh, I use a large number of the top plugins in the OP, but I've never had any trouble dropping back to "vanilla" vi/m in ssh shells or whatever. It's just a matter of convenience; there's nothing there that's so totally transformational that you won't be able to use vim without it.
- pgl 12y ago
  > If there's no vi How often are you in a situation where there's no vi!?
  - alexkus 12y ago
farslan 12y ago
Awesome work, as a Vim user and plugin maintainer I loved it.
elwell 12y ago
"From Across the Universe", indeed: an emacs mode seems to have slipped in by accident: http://vimawesome.com/plugin/haskell-mode http://vimawesome.com/plugin/haskell-mode
TheSoftwareGuy 12y ago
only thing I don't like is that all installation instructions seem to assume you are running vim from a *nix system.
codemaster3000 12y ago
This looks awesome! Thanks so much for this. I have a sort of unrelated question that I'd like to ask, since you implemented this so well. On one of my current side projects, I was also trying to implement scrolling by j/k, but couldn't find a nice way to do it. Could you explain how you managed to do it? I have something that works, but it's really jerky, and doesn't accelerate properly like yours does. Thanks again for this awesome site!
- divad12 12y ago
  Hi! Glad you like the j/k scrolling. All it is is a call to `window.scrollTo()` with some logic to determine the position of the element we want to scroll to. See [1] for the code of the actual function that does the scrolling. Is there acceleration? There doesn't seem to be on Chrome for Mac. :/ Oh, if you meant the little arrow ("»") that slides to the right on focus of a plugin, that's just the CSS 3 transition `all 0.1s ease-out` applied to a changing `left` and `opacity`. See [2] for code. Thanks for checking out the site! [1]: https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/blob/13d576664aa88fe09d8e6182eef5f3e95dd412ad/web/static/js/app.jsx#L76 https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/blob/13d576664aa88fe0... [2]: https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/blob/13d576664aa88fe09d8e6182eef5f3e95dd412ad/web/static/sass/screen.scss#L1175 https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/blob/13d576664aa88fe0...
vdm 12y ago
Very nice. Suggestion: in the search box, pushState only onBlur (so it doesn't spam history, forcing you to hit. the. back. button. through. Every. Character.)
netfeed 12y ago
Love it, found ctrlp thanks too it. What a great plugin
kornerstoane 12y ago
I've tried switching from pathogen to Vundle a couple of times and given up when I couldn't figure out how to get it to find a few of my old plugins. This site gives me the Vundle commands that work. Finally! What a great idea - scanning github for .vimrc's and extracting what folks have done with them! You've advanced the platform with this contribution.

222 points by divad12 12y ago

56 of them are Tim Pope...damn that guy is prolific http://vimawesome.com/?q=Tim%20Pope http://vimawesome.com/?q=Tim%20Pope

platz 12y ago
Shougo is quite prolific as well
- tobeportable 12y ago
  http://vimawesome.com/?q=Shougo http://vimawesome.com/?q=Shougo

Crito 12y ago

Looks pretty cool. One comment though: when clicking through the categories on the left, I see "x [number]" next to some of the tags, but that number doesn't seem to match the number of plugins that will actually be shown if you click on it. Example: Completion->'deliminators x 3' shows three yellowish plugins, and then three differently colors plugins. What is the significance of the colors? Example: Other->'manager x 3' shows no results.

divad12 12y ago
Hi! Thank you for checking this out! The reason for the mis-match between # of plugins and tags count is the tags count only counts plugins with that tag in the category the tag is nested under. I agree this is quite confusing, and should just make the two views consistent. I'll add an issue to GitHub about it. Each category has a distinct color. > Other->'manager x 3' shows no results Oh, we hide plugin mangers right now, so no results are shown. :( Will fix this to be nicer, thanks.

statik_42 12y ago

This is exactly the kind of visually appealing and easily navigable Vim plugin directory I've been searching for ever since I started using it last year. Thank you for sharing, this is fantastic!

divad12 12y ago
Thank you! Wanting such a thing is why we built it. :)
lexalizer 12y ago
+1. Thank you for the effort you put in.
DrJ 12y ago
I guess it's good that my Vundles are basically the top 10. Ha!

googletron 12y ago

I wrote this how do I categorize this? http://vimawesome.com/plugin/numbers-vim http://vimawesome.com/plugin/numbers-vim

xymostech 12y ago
Just click the edit button next to "uncategorized", and select a category. You can edit and add tags as well if you'd like.
lucianp 12y ago
Numbers is one of my favourite Vim plugins! Looks like you are the author. Thank you so much for writing it!

dpcx 12y ago

This is pretty cool. However, clicking on a plugin takes you to [1] (for example). Clicking on the header there takes you to [2]. This is probably not the intended behaviour. [1]: http://vimawesome.com/plugin/vim-airline-sad-beautiful-tragic http://vimawesome.com/plugin/vim-airline-sad-beautiful-tragi... [2]: http://vimawesome.com/plugin/plugin/vim-airline-sad-beautiful-tragic http://vimawesome.com/plugin/plugin/vim-airline-sad-beautifu...

divad12 12y ago
Oops, that's definitely a bug! Issue raised: https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/issues/16 https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/issues/16 Thanks for finding this.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

neduma 12y ago

Great. cool. awesome. so we don't need muck with plug-in help text to read the doc. we can read it here

xer0x 12y ago

awesome

nwh 12y ago

Neat idea, but that website needs some serious contrast. Almost unreadable when scaled.

chrismorgan 12y ago
That’s solarized for you… (I never could stand it).
- swah 12y ago
  I need contrast in the colors so I can turn down contrast and brightness in the monitor.

kasperset 12y ago

Not that it matters but I think this is built using Reactjs.

chenglou 12y ago
It does, if you consider that spicyj worked on this and that he's a core React contributor =).
- divad12 12y ago
  In fact, this was the first React project that he worked on -- he rewrote our old angular app within a week of when React first came out, and had been hooked since.
  - john2x 12y ago
    Cool! Does he have plans to write an article about his experience writing this in React? That would be an interesting read, especially since it's open source.

waitingkuo 12y ago

This is really awesome. And the search bar works well!

shock 12y ago

FWIW, Vundle doesn't use :BundleInstall anymore, it's :PluginInstall. Similarly it's Plugin ".../..." instead of Bundle ".../..."

divad12 12y ago
Indeed -- https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/pull/17 https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/pull/17 Thanks for pointing this out to us. Will merge when I get home.
- shock 12y ago
  You're most welcome. Sorry for not creating a pull request myself, but I was dead tired last night.
stack_underflow 12y ago
Also, the new Plugin command doesn't support double quoted string arguments, it gets parsed as a trailing comment. I discovered this after I s//'d my Bundle "<plugin>" lines to Plugin "<plugin>" and received 'Argument required' errors. The fix was to use single quote strings, i.e. Plugin '<plugin>'

johncoltrane 12y ago

Right, because stars on github are a perfect indication that a plugin will work for me.

kaishiro 12y ago
Where is it stated that it's a perfect metric for plugin relevancy? Alternatively, what would be a better metric. Any ideas?
- oinksoft 12y ago
  http://www.vim.org/scripts/script_search_results.php?keywords=&script_type=&order_by=rating&direction=descending&search=search http://www.vim.org/scripts/script_search_results.php?keyword...
  - kaishiro 12y ago
    So we're just trading one measure of popularity with another?
- johncoltrane 12y ago
  It's the one that is used on that awesome site. A better metric is actually trying all the alternatives.
divad12 12y ago
You're right that GitHub stars probably isn't the best metric of how good a plugin is. We try to use a more unbiased metric of relative # of actual users, and this we get by scraping dotfiles repos on GitHub, looking for references to Vim plugins. That's shown as the # users count to the left of stars on GitHub. It's also not perfect, but it's a useful source of relative usage statistics.
- johncoltrane 12y ago
  My point is two-fold: 1. You can't have real and complete usage statistics so those metrics are at best meaningless and at worst misleading. Also, something being popular doesn't mean that it will fit one's workflow and needs. 2. Choosing a tool because of its perceived (through meaningless/misleading numbers) is not really the smarter way to build-up one's config.

fataliss 12y ago

This is one of the best looking Vim ressource I stumbled upon so far! Finally a little care for something else than raw information. My eyes thank you, creators of vimawesome.

divad12 12y ago
Thank you! The color scheme used is Solarized, courtesy of Ethan Schoonover: http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized

lucianp 12y ago

This is awesome indeed! I've just thought of two features that would make it even more awesome. Every plugin could have the following two lists: 1. Known to be incompatible with 2. Frequently installed together with The first list would have to be user-edited, but the second one could theoretically be determined by searching github.

divad12 12y ago
Thanks, these are great suggestions! Added two issues: 1. https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/issues/40 https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/issues/40 2. https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/issues/39 https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/issues/39

alexkus 12y ago

I just can't get excited about vim plugins (no matter how good they are, no matter how much I love vi/vim - and no disrespect to their authors). I can imagine how they could increase my productivity (to some extent) but... I'm old school, I work happily with vi, many of the customers I dealt with going back to the mid-90s never gave me a choice. SunOS 4.1.3U5 (ugh). AIX 3. Heady days of Solaris 2.5. Bog standard vi. vim is a bonus, but I'm far from lost when it's just vi. I love macros, but I can still get stuff done if they aren't available. If there's no vi then I'm not lost either, I can work around stuff with awk/sed/etc. Fundamentally I don't want to have to ever install a bunch of stuff in multiple places to create a common environment for myself. That's a big problem that hasn't been solved yet. I just want it to be the same everywhere, which is why I don't rely on zsh or even ksh, and I just go for the bare minimum. I've been to too many customers to know that not being able to do stuff within someone else's environment is really not a good thing. I've seen people escorted off customer sites because they've been ineffectual. But, the biggest takeway is that I've seen too many new employees/interns that are lost without their expected favoured environment, and it's not getting better. vim plugins aside, there's a growing lack of adaptability.

thenerdfiles 12y ago
This site could implement an ACL though github accounts and provide centralized, recipe-like plugin and *rc file mashups like alias.sh with an ifttt.com twist.
gipp 12y ago
Eh, I use a large number of the top plugins in the OP, but I've never had any trouble dropping back to "vanilla" vi/m in ssh shells or whatever. It's just a matter of convenience; there's nothing there that's so totally transformational that you won't be able to use vim without it.
pgl 12y ago
> If there's no vi How often are you in a situation where there's no vi!?
- alexkus 12y ago

farslan 12y ago

Awesome work, as a Vim user and plugin maintainer I loved it.

elwell 12y ago

"From Across the Universe", indeed: an emacs mode seems to have slipped in by accident: http://vimawesome.com/plugin/haskell-mode http://vimawesome.com/plugin/haskell-mode

TheSoftwareGuy 12y ago

only thing I don't like is that all installation instructions seem to assume you are running vim from a *nix system.

codemaster3000 12y ago

This looks awesome! Thanks so much for this. I have a sort of unrelated question that I'd like to ask, since you implemented this so well. On one of my current side projects, I was also trying to implement scrolling by j/k, but couldn't find a nice way to do it. Could you explain how you managed to do it? I have something that works, but it's really jerky, and doesn't accelerate properly like yours does. Thanks again for this awesome site!

divad12 12y ago
Hi! Glad you like the j/k scrolling. All it is is a call to `window.scrollTo()` with some logic to determine the position of the element we want to scroll to. See [1] for the code of the actual function that does the scrolling. Is there acceleration? There doesn't seem to be on Chrome for Mac. :/ Oh, if you meant the little arrow ("»") that slides to the right on focus of a plugin, that's just the CSS 3 transition `all 0.1s ease-out` applied to a changing `left` and `opacity`. See [2] for code. Thanks for checking out the site! [1]: https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/blob/13d576664aa88fe09d8e6182eef5f3e95dd412ad/web/static/js/app.jsx#L76 https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/blob/13d576664aa88fe0... [2]: https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/blob/13d576664aa88fe09d8e6182eef5f3e95dd412ad/web/static/sass/screen.scss#L1175 https://github.com/divad12/vim-awesome/blob/13d576664aa88fe0...

vdm 12y ago

Very nice. Suggestion: in the search box, pushState only onBlur (so it doesn't spam history, forcing you to hit. the. back. button. through. Every. Character.)

netfeed 12y ago

Love it, found ctrlp thanks too it. What a great plugin

kornerstoane 12y ago

I've tried switching from pathogen to Vundle a couple of times and given up when I couldn't figure out how to get it to find a few of my old plugins. This site gives me the Vundle commands that work. Finally! What a great idea - scanning github for .vimrc's and extracting what folks have done with them! You've advanced the platform with this contribution.