My .vimrc and various plugins

What you're looking at

What you're seeing here is my own vimrc, which has a collection of useful features and (in my opinion) must have settings to make vim feel more like an IDE. I use productized IDEs for most development, but I'm in vim often.

Why these plugins?

I work with these plugins on a daily basis, and they interoperate well together:

• I tried all of the major tabbar plugins, and while the one I chose is rather.. let's say.. "not polished", with various code problems and documentation mistakes as well as copy/paste issues, it works very well with NERDtree. The other tab plugins I tried can have issues when you use NERDtree and vertical splits, but this one works nicely and supports my major use, which is lots of buffer opens and closes with my custom keys, while switching between buffers with C-TAB and C-SHIFT-TAB.

• Command-T is absolutely awesome. Seriously. This is a killer feature for me. If you're not using this all the time, you should start.

• I tried several debugging plugins, and this is the only one I found remotely usable. I did notice that the way it bound the comma key slowed down searching backwards on the current line (normal comma function), so I rebound that.

• NERDtree and taglist both do a very nice job, and IMO are best in class.

• pathogen, linked up to github. No explanation required.

Why these settings?

• I like to open tons of buffers and close them quickly. C-D kills a buffer, C-X closes a window, and the movement keys (C-H/J/K/L) navigate between windows.

• Relative line numbering is the bee's knees. Really, think of all the commands that are made easier when you can just glance and see how far away you are from your target line.

• Auto-complete is modded to be easier and much more "IDE-like".

• Search is also modernized, with custom IDE-like grep, better highlighting, and smart-casing.

• Quick and easy ctags generation - just hit \r to run your ctagsgen.sh script without locking up the IDE.