[mpk]

Not to rain on anybody's parade here, but for first-time vim users I recommend not using any plugins and only selectively adding them one at a time after the basics (buffers, navigation, some ex mode, etc) are at least somewhat familiar.

Getting started with plugins enabled makes it hard to understand where vim stops and plugins begin and make switching to a different (someone else's) vim setup confusing at best.

It also tends to feed the 'make it work like the last editor I used' syndrome, which is completely counter-productive.

Otherwise, nice work and good job open-sourcing it!

[adamesque]

Completely respect where you're coming from, but totally disagree. I made a few abortive switches to Vim that didn't last a week because my productivity was too hampered and the environment too extreme & foreign.

To a newcomer like me, Vim's built-in help was less than worthless, since you pretty much need to know the Vim term for what you're looking up to find it. Googling around wasn't much more effective (there's a lot of garbage in the Wikia for Vim that comes up at the top of many searches).

In the end, I needed to read these two "gentle" introductions to Vim to even understand what it was all about:

http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/coming-home-to-vim/

http://yehudakatz.com/2010/07/29/everyone-who-tried-to-convi...

…and then I needed a mostly-well-documented distro like Janus (https://github.com/carlhuda/janus) to ensure that my productivity wouldn't take a huge hit those first few weeks.

Some folks can probably go all-in cold turkey, but I needed the training wheels.

[johncoltrane]

The problem wasn't the "extreme & foreign environment", the problem was that you thought wrongly that you could learn Vim as if it were a regular editor.

Learning Vim is a side project: something you do casually, slowly, until and if you are able to do the actual switch.

Those braindead distributions are just smoke mirrors for lazy and pressed people: they provide training wheels but they actively prevent you from actually learning core Vim. They make people $distribution_name users instead of Vim users.

[textminer]

"vimtutor" is pretty gentle. Alternatively, http://vim-adventures.com/ is just fun.

[cgdangelo]

> I made a few abortive switches to Vim that didn't last a week because my productivity was too hampered and the environment too extreme & foreign.

That was my experience as well. I was pretty comfortable using vim in emergencies but the few times I tried to make it my full-time IDE failed very quickly. Once I stole Gary Bernhardt's dotfiles[1] I was able to stick with it because I didn't have to start from scratch with keymaps, plugins, etc.

[1] https://github.com/garybernhardt/dotfiles

[adiM]

> I made a few abortive switches to Vim that didn't last a week because my productivity was too hampered and the environment too extreme & foreign.

I started vim by using cream[1], which behaves like a normal editor with menus to configure everything. Once you get used to the different concepts, you can start editing the `.creamrc` file. After a few years, I was comfortable enough to drop cream completely and use hand written vimrc file for the configuration that I liked.

[1]: http://cream.sourceforge.net/

[chongli]

The best I can recommend is Learning the vi Editor by O'Reilly. This book will really teach you to understand the command languages of ex and vi (and how they interact). Once you've mastered that, vim will make a lot more sense as it's just a gigantic pile of extra stuff built around that core functionality.

[59nadir]

> I made a few abortive switches to Vim that didn't last a week because my productivity was too hampered

What exactly was it you were doing faster and better in your previous editor (which was?)?

> the environment [was] too extreme & foreign

What about it was weird?

[anaphor]

For me it was using pentadactyl for a while beforehand that made switching easier. Obviously there are different concepts and some different default keybindings but pentadactyl is much easier to incrementally get used to imo.

[jlgreco]

I absolutely agree. Trying to use 'oh-my-zsh bundle' analogues for Vim is absolutely the wrong approach (for that matter, I think oh-my-zsh itself is the wrong approach). There is enough to learn already, blurring the line between what Vim does and what plugins do does not help the situation at all.

This said, I think these sort of dumps are great for experienced vim users who can pick through them and find individual fragments that they want to adopt.

[typicalrunt]

Another thing that people often forget when they use plugins on their development machine is that if they happen to ssh into server (or work on another user's machine), it is unlikely that it will contain the same plugins. It is better to become effective at using the bare vi/vim commands first and only use plugins as a time-saver.

[adiM]

This is true for using plugins in any editor/IDE. Where do you draw the line. Should I use my own `.vimrc` file and set textwidth, formatting-options, indenting, etc. according to my preference, or don't tweak anything at all because those tweaks will not be available at another user's machine/ssh server? It is relatively easy to have your configuration files on a USB/dropbox and copy them on a new machine if needed.

[fhd2]

Agreed, also goes for Emacs. Not a fan of starter kits, they tend to confuse experienced users and newbies alike.

[eliasmacpherson]

That is a sensible suggestion, I would go further and suggest that new users impulsively reject answers to questions "How do I do X in vim" that are "use plugin y" and find a native way of doing it, because plugins will increase the difficulty in working in new environments.

[enduser]

Using vi instead of vim for a while is also beneficial. It keeps one from learning bad behavior like typing 'i' and then hitting the arrow and necessitates learning about marks before being spoiled by the visual modes

[efnx]

I definitely agree. Vim was much more confusing for me while still a beginner, partly because I started with first the spf-13 distro and then haskim, a haskell-focused distro. I didn't really start grasping how things worked until building up my own distro. The funny thing is that most distros I've seen still include many of the same plugins, making the end product only unique in the details. Those details however, are blockers once you're set in your ways...

[tokipin]

as an anecdote, i've been using Vim for almost 10 years and i've never used plugins. the extent of my customization is setting the font/color scheme in the vimrc

[INTPenis]

Long time VIM user here and I completely agree, not only for beginners, also for pros.

Basically it follows the KISS, and in some sense UNIX, principles.

I have never used the vim distros but I have gotten to a point where I just rm -rf'd my whole .vim dir and started over with only the plugins I required at the time. Then added more as I needed them.

Of course, I have always managed well without the file browsers many use.

[mattschmulen]

Normally I would agree, foundation first then mature into plugins and add-ons however after looking into Maximum Awesome I believe it will help new users overcome the learning curve frustration that vim is known for; very nice. kind of like a twitter bootstrap for vim

[ElongatedTowel]

I'd say that syntax/completion scripts are an exception as they are pretty much mandatory if you're writing code in a language that hasn't made it's way into the official release (and to be frank, there are a lot of gaps).