Plug-ins are always a personal choice. For me the most essential is fuzzy finder with ctrl-P. With this I can arrive at any file or line in a massive codebase d

Plug-ins are always a personal choice. For me the most essential is fuzzy finder with ctrl-P. With this I can arrive at any file or line in a massive codebase damn near instantly. I find vim with the right plugins is as capable as any IDE, you can at least have the basics like autocomplete and various syntax highlighters and linters. Personally I think developers who lean heavily on the IDE features of more common tools are using it as a crutch for not knowing the codebase very well or language features. Part of the journey to vim mastery is the configuration of vim until it fits you like a glove, once you’ve configured it well you rarely need to touch the config files again.