A caveat of this approach is : all plugins are centralized in init.vim, such as coc-snippets BUT I ended up adding them outside with coc, such as: coc-tsserver, coc-rust-analyzer, coc-pyright, …
Any langage server I tried MAY kick in the fan (same as any server spawn by another editor (vscode, jetbrain, …)).
I added elixir-ls last month and it is good (albeit no “gr” “/go to references”).
I think this is something Elixir/Erlang might beat out VimScript / Lua / ELisp on: without shared mutable state, when all plugins are separate processes, they might ‘combine’ better.
This is why I generally stick to plugins created by the same people (big emphasis on the word “generally” there, it is by no means a rule). I still haven’t switched over to nvim (and honestly not sure I ever will) so for me that means most of my plugins are by Tim Pope and by people who generally follow his principles. A handful of people make plugins that depend on his plugins so even though I have a quite a few of them, I’ve never really had any problems with conflicts.
Other things I look for when choosing plugins:
They don’t provide out-of-the-box leader mappings—I don’t know why, but this always makes me distrust a plugin author’s sensibilities (rightfully or wrongly so)… leave my leader mappings alone!!!
I always make sure the plugin is written in pure viml unless there is a very good reason for it not to be (I can tell this is probably pretty contentious amongst some in this thread). I don’t really know if this helps anything, but they always feel speedier and are easier for me to understand the source.
As for NERDTree, I really like it! The thing is, I only use it when I need to get some context on how how files are organized—the vast majority of the time it stays closed. I have mappings to toggle it open and closed as well as a mapping to open it with the directory of the current file expand. Also, I have it set to automatically close whenever I open a file (that was such a killer feature for me when I realized that was a setting). Otherwise it’s fuzzy-finding all the way. And if you’re good about keeping your open buffers under control, the :buffer command (or simply :b) is even quicker for jumping to files you’re currently working on.
While I wish I could code Elixir all day and night long, I need to work with other languages too. VS Code seems to be the best all-around editor/IDE. But my setup is CLI-heavy:
I run formatting and tests with watchexec -e 'ex,exs,eex,heex,lock' -- 'mix format & mix test --stale'
I use git and lazygit.
This year José Valim is using Livebook to solve Advent of Code, but two years ago he was using plain Sublime with no plugins really. That made me think a lot.
I just looked up the Elixir plugin for Jet Brains, because I really liked RubyMine back when I used it, but almost every review this year for that plugin says it crashes constantly. What kind of stability are you experiencing?
I have been using it for over 3 years with RubyMine. Now I am using the plugin with latest RubyMine. Have not noticed any crashes. However, I usually run the mix tools and other associated tools from terminal. Not sure what kind of crashes others faced but as far as I am concerned it’s pretty stable!
