I adore Vim, I use it every day, and I wouldn’t dream of switching to anything else, but every once in a while I’m reminded of another thing about it that is just unequivocally bad and indefensible.

I was reading about the “CoC” plugin (“Conqueror of Completion”) this morning when I thought, “Wait, can’t Omni completion do some of that?” So I opened up Vim with a minimal .vimrc and typed:

document.que<C-x><C-o>

<C-x><C-o> opens Vim’s native Omni completion function, which I would expect to be at least somewhat current on JavaScript methods in 2020. Instead, nothing came up.

I had a look at the source of the JavaScript completion function in Vim, and found this: a file that was last updated three years ago, but that hasn’t been meaningfully updated since 2006.

So how have Vim users been getting by?

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Despite not agreeing with all of it, “Just Use Sublime Text” (an invective against Vim — or, more accurately, against recommending Vim to anyone who isn’t already indoctrinated by it) by Andrew Ray is an interesting read. The section dealing with indenting in particular struck a chord with me:

Paste this into an empty buffer:

<div>
<p>
<span>foo</span>
</p>
</div>

:set ft=html and then gg=G. Let me know what you get. In all seriousness, never, ever tell me what you get.

As I said in a tweet, what I got didn’t offend me too much. But many people would argue that the <span> tag should be indented inside the <p> tag. I’d probably do this myself, actually — and there have been aspects of Vim’s indenting that irk me. So I set about finding a solution.

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