I think this is terrible advice. While it is true that one should avoid getting lost down the plugin rabbit hole, for many of us, the whole point of Vim is that it is a configurable, composable editor.
As for being "cripped" without my vimrc, well, moving tiny text files around is pretty much a solved problem at this point. And as a developer, I'd prefer to optimize my 99.9% of the time environment, and not worry about the .1% of the time I'm away from it.
I do, however, recommend that your vimrc is something you should build up over time, understanding what you are putting into it, rather than grabbing some big off-the-shelf framework and using it without understanding what is going on.
- Go version: https://github.com/samuell/devbox-golang
- Python version: https://github.com/samuell/devbox-python
I love being able to SSH in to a fresh docker (yes, I use fat SSH:able docker), and enjoy full auto-completion for python and Go! :)
But yeah, except for the auto-completion and a few minor tweaks, there's not too much extras there.
Plus, the overhead is a lot less.
Without stuff like that I'm still fine should I find myself on a remote machine. But I don't see an issue with making myself more comfortable than just being 'fine' on my personal setup where I spend most of my time.
I think the key is to vet your plugin and mapping choices to ones that expand upon vim in some way and avoid those that override core functionality or prevent you from learning them. If you do that you should be fine without imposing an arbitraty vimrc length.
From memory I've only changed about 5 lines in my vimrc ? enabling mouse and setting indentation levels for some less common filetypes.
I've done major swaps between Emacs and (n)vi over the years (currently all vi all the time now, but if you caught me last year, I was ~6 years into my Emacs phase...) -- anyway: the fussing and portability is what kept me from developing custom elisp scripts that I couldn't be guaranteed to have sitting down at every computer, and what now keeps me in nvi, and my nvi usage pretty "vanilla". It's not clear to me if its only the fear of getting caught w/o a custom environment is what's keeping me from developing that environment, but regardless, my env is vanilla.
Edit: typos
This also means when I had a computer outage and borrowed my wife's MBA without an dev tools aside from what came with OS X, I logged into dropbox, copied my .profile from dropbox and magically had a working, customized Vim on her computer. After a Git clone I was productive in maybe 20 minutes tops. Just imagine trying to do that with visual studio (i've tried, there goes a day).
1. You have to import/export every time a change is made!
2. Visual Studio takes like 6 hours to install.
2. I install VS quite a bit, it's not that long at all. More time than sublime et all though, agreed. I usually have it as my "parallel" process while I go clone my repos.
If I had to choose 1 plugin, I would choose Unite. It's great for development projects where you have lots of files. Especially when you set up key bindings. Having 3+ files open at the same time (model, view, controller, tests) is a pain to have to type the paths each time. Often times you need to open them have them open at the same time. Having quick keybindings to open new windows and navigate them are really a blessing. The default controls are too much of a pain for this workflow.
The ones that highlight syntax errors in python, or js, or that spit out compilation errors for C are a must, and one of the most important features for me.
The plugins that take hours to configure, and let you press on key instead of three for some infrequent action: yes, avoid them. No matter how fancy they look, and how well someone tries to sell it to you.
CtrlP is also a must for me. Instantly open any file, even if I vaguely recall it's name. And no configuration necessary (though you can optionally tweak it a bit).
I've also been using vim for 10 or 15 years. I typically use a couple of plugins (1-3) and that's it. I leave the key bindings alone. I've never liked vimscript and have only done a few things there. Luckily I started that way and stayed that way, so vim actually has saved me time.
I've been using vim for 15+ years now, since late 1990's. I use viemu in Visual Studio and I've written code in 10+ languages in vim. I've written non-trivial vimscripts and integration tools with other parts of my workflows over the years. I love how comfortable it feels, and I feel crippled when I have to use a 'normal' editor; like walking with a little pebble in your shoe - not a big a deal enough to prevent you from doing anything you could otherwise, but still damn uncomfortable.
With that said, I'm not convinced that I've actually saved time with it. I shudder if I think of the many man-days I spend 10 years ago on getting this and that plugin working, tweaking settings and keybindings for things I use twice a month tops and automating things that I could have done manually 10 times faster. It's not like regular editors are that much slower to use. It felt like throwing off a yoke when I dumped all those plugins so that I could focus on writing software, instead of tweaking the editor so that I could write programs with a few keystrokes.
So yeah, that was gramps' advice I guess...