The Essential IdeaVim Plugins

A curated plugin list to enhance your IdeaVim experience

Amine Elhattami
Better Programming
Published in
13 min readFeb 17, 2022

--

Photo by Justin Morgan on Unsplash

I’ve been using IdeaVim with JetBrains IDEs (e.g., Pycharm) for both personal projects and work for a while now. I think that I’m comfortable enough to say that it replaced my previous Vim/Neovim setup, especially for large-scale projects. Of course, I still use Neovim for editing config files from the terminal, but other than that, it is all IdeaVim.

As I was switching from Neovim, I’ve first compiled a list of essential remaps that I shared in my previous article, which got a lot of attention (6K views, to be precise) to my surprise and motivated me to work on this one. In this post, I’m sharing the list of IdeaVim plugins that I use daily to make the experience even better.

I added animated GIFs throughout this post because I believe they paint a better picture and make it easy for you to understand what each plugin does. However, it is not enough in some cases, and explaining all the intricate details in a single post will make it too long. As additional material, I started publishing videos that go into more detail for each plugin.

As a background, I used Neovim for around three years as my main editor. However, I realized that I was spending valuable time updating my config instead of adding value to my projects which…

--

--

NLP Research Developer @ServiceNow Research — Ph.D. Student @Mila. Opinions are my own. Support my work: https://amine-elhattami.medium.com/membership