Lessons from having a complex vim config: don't do it

It's a time sink.

Having the vim configuration break all the time, and pasting in "nice to have" stuff has caused me more disruption / harm than it has benefitted me. I'm trying to turn my VIM into a lean editing system, and just learning plain-old VIM more effectively.

If you want to go back to where I used to be to look feel free to see: https://github.com/tony/vim-config-framework/tree/2018-06-09

I'm hoping to have a happier, healthier VIM experience, life, etc. with a simple vim config.

Plugin Architecture

This configuration implements an auto-installing, gracefully degrading plugin system built on vim-plug:

• Auto-Installation: Automatically bootstraps vim-plug and installs plugins on first run
• Graceful Degradation: Conditionally loads plugins based on available executables and features
• Modular Design: Supports local customizations through plugins.d/ and plugins.settings/ directories
• Progressive Enhancement: Basic functionality always works, advanced features added when dependencies exist

Testing

The repo now exposes its hermetic Vim harness as the installable libtestvim package under src/libtestvim, with grouped just recipes as the main entrypoint:

• just sync installs the project and test dependencies via uv
• just lists recipes grouped by purpose
• just probe prints the current Vim capability report
• just test runs the fast hermetic suites
• just test-tmux runs the libtmux terminal smoke test on its own socket
• just benchmark runs testvim bench --emit-bundle --append-history
• just compare benchmarks the current branch against the remote default branch
• just compare-multi compares the current branch against multiple refs
• just serve-mcp serves libtestvim as a FastMCP server over stdio
• GitHub Actions runs the merge-gate verification path with just probe, just vint, just test-all, just benchmark, and just compare
• the repo vendors autoload/plug.vim so the harness works from a clean checkout and in CI without relying on prior local bootstrap state

libtestvim can be used three ways:

• as a Python API returning dataclasses with Pydantic-backed JSON and JSONL helpers
• as the testvim CLI for probing, running, benchmarking, and comparing configs
• as a FastMCP server exposing benchmark and comparison tools plus artifact resources

Python dependencies are managed by uv. System tools like vim, tmux, and hyperfine remain external prerequisites.

See tests/README.md for the suite layout, artifact model, and fixture corpus.

Please check out:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/vim/wiki/vimrctips
• https://www.reddit.com/r/vim/wiki/10th_rule
• https://www.reddit.com/r/vim/wiki/norc
• https://www.vi-improved.org/recommendations/

License

MIT

Vendorizes sensible.vim and vim-plug. autoload/plug.vim retains the upstream MIT license header.