Remember a few months ago when I said that I had permanently deleted MacVim from my machine(s) and was going BBEdit/GUI forever? Yeah, about that.

My recently renewed fascination with Mutt reminded me how truly nice it can be editing text with VIM. So I’ve installed MacVim once again and spent some time tweaking my .vimrc file. I know, the urge to tweak the .vimrc file is one of the reasons I decided to stop using VIM in the first place. I contain multitudes, no?

I’ve tried keeping things to a miniumum this time, but there are some plugins I can’t live without. Here are the ones I’m running this time:

• Ack - Uses Ack for searches
• nerdtree - The only file browser I’ve ever been able to deal with
• vim-colors-solarized - Nice color scheme based on Ethan Schoonover’s palettes.
• vim-fugitive - “a Git wrapper so awesome, it should be illegal”
• vim-markdown - Helpers for writing in Markdown
• vim-pandoc - Helpers for converting files using Pandoc
• vim-peepopen - Interface to the PeepOpen app
• vim-repeat Better handling of the repeat “.” command
• writer.vim - Simple plugin that makes writing prose in VIM nicer