I think your experience hits on a problem with vim distributions - you're jumping into a solution to someone else's pain points. spf13, which has a lot of grea

I think your experience hits on a problem with vim distributions - you're jumping into a solution to someone else's pain points. spf13, which has a lot of great plugins, probably started as someone's personal collection of plugins at some point. As such, the author had a lot of time to muse on what her/his current vim set up was missing. Sharing someone else's vim distribution, you miss out on the motivation behind including things (and also on the opportunity to pick alternatives more suited to your needs). I would start with stock vim and spend a few minutes outlining the features you need. I recommend, as a minimal set, a couple of plugins I think most people are happy about: Vundle [or Pathogen] (two managers for vim plugins hosted on GitHub) https://github.com/gmarik/Vundle.vim https://github.com/gmarik/Vundle.vim [https://github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen https://github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen] Sensible vim (useful defaults for vim) https://github.com/tpope/vim-sensible https://github.com/tpope/vim-sensible Fugitive (make vim aware of your local git repository) https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive