---
title: How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim)
teaser: From the NYC Vim Meetup, Max Cantor explores tradeoffs between plugin complexity,
  and achieving similar results with built in Vim features.
tags: vim,new york city
author: Thom Obarski
published_on: 2017-01-20
---

From the August 2016 [New York City Vim
Meetup](https://www.meetup.com/The-New-York-Vim-Meetup/), [Max
Cantor](https://github.com/mcantor) explores tradeoffs between plugin
complexity, and achieving similar results with built in Vim features.

<iframe
  title="How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim) - YouTube"
  width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XA2WjJbmmoM"
frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

> Vim is big; so big that it does some very useful things that are often
> overlooked. Plugins can buy us a lot of functionality, but they can add a lot
> of burden in the form of dependency complexity. In this talk, we'll explore
> some of the tradeoffs we can make between plugins and "vanilla" Vim features
> that achieve similar results, including:
>
> - autocomplete (VimAwesome, YouCompleteMe)
> - file jumping (FuzzyFinder, Ctrl-P)
> - visual filesystem navigation (NERDTree)
> - build integration
> - snippets
>
> The "slides" and supplemental vimrc are available [here](https://github.com/mcantor/no_plugins)

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