At the end of July I dropped CtrlP and other plugins from my Vim setup. CtrlP was one of the first that I installed and until a couple of weeks ago I would’ve deemed it an essential plugin.

The truth is that I never learned how to navigate effectively with Vim’s built-in commands. I know how to use :e and its companions, but beyond that I never gave it any thought.

It turns out that Vim’s tab completion, coupled with the wildmenu option, works really well since it can complete everything from buffers, unopened files to tags.

Built-ins

Navigating buffers

I use this for listing and switching buffers:

nnoremap § :ls<cr>:b

The § key is on the same row as the numbers on my keyboard, which makes it fitting. I also have this in my .vimrc:

nnoremap <BS> <C-^>

This will jump to the last edited file. Typing ^ requires two keystrokes for me, hence the remapping.

Navigating tags

:tag <name>

You can also search for a tag by pattern:

:tag /<pattern>

I find tags extra useful when I’m dealing with CSS. If I want to jump to a class named .block I can do :tag .bl, press <Tab> and then hit <Enter>.

Finding files

:find <filename>

I unfortunately find tab completion to be a bit slow with the above command, but since I don’t work with large codebases I don’t use it that much.

To make it work recursively you need to modify the path option:

set path+=**

You also need to make sure to modify the wildignore option too, unless you want to include files that belong to your dependencies:

set wildignore+=*/node_modules/*,*/vendor/*

Grepping

I regularly grep for all kinds of things. I’ve used ack.vim, ctrlsf.vim and I even wrote my own plugin. I ended up removing it and changing the grepprg and grepformat options instead:

if executable('ack')
  set grepprg=ack\ -s\ -H\ --nogroup\ --nocolor\ --column
  set grepformat=%f:%l:%c:%m,%f:%l:%m
endif

I use ack since it works well on both Linux and Windows systems. I also added a small helper command, courtesy of thoughtbot’s guide on “Faster Grepping in Vim”:

command! -bang -nargs=* -complete=file -bar Grep silent! grep! <args>

Which I then use like this:

:Grep <args>

If I want to use git-grep instead of ack I run :Ggrep, a feature from vim-fugitive.

One of the nicest features that comes with ack.vim and other grepping plugins is that the quickfix window opens automatically after searching. Luckily, it’s not hard to enable that either:

autocmd QuickFixCmdPost *grep* cwindow

The above snippet comes from vim-fugitive’s FAQ.

Alternatives

When I removed CtrlP I actually swapped it for another plugin, DidYouMean. I think the author describes its use case best:

If you’re like me and you want to edit a specific file with Vim, say, test.py, you type vim te into the terminal, then you hit <Tab> and <Enter> immediately because you think your shell expands the characters to the right file name. But if there’s another file starting with te, Vim fires up with an empty file called te, laughing at you. That’s annoying. This simple plugin makes Vim ask for the right file to open.

The plugin is only a handful of lines long, but it saves me from so much frustration.