Can We Have Too Many Tools?

Vim is a great editor. There are so many plugins that make it even better and increase my productivity. But can there be a saturation point where it's not worth finding the next plugin to shave a keystroke off of a command? I've been trying to find the sweet spot for the right amount of tools for the job.

Bigger Toolbox

Having more developers to talk to and work with, I have been exposed to different methods of development. Yan in particular, has been a tremendous Vim resource. He's made it his focus to optimize working with this editor as much as possible, and it's quite impressive. I've adopted some of his ideas, no longer content to be "good enough" with Vim.

Janus has been a tremendous help. It exposed me to command-T, which is now my favorite thing ever. I no longer use a buffer explorer because it's easier to just find it with command-T than search through the buffer list. I also rarely use NERD tree now, since I was using that mostly as a convenience to open project files. I'll still use it for looking in directories, but it's not open by default anymore.

From Yan, I've install git-grep and mapped K to search for the word under the cursor, and that's been such a pleasant, and faster experience, than using vimgrep. Yan is also cleaning up a plugin for rspec integration that provides some nice wins.

Too Big?

But how far do I take this path? I could continue to add plugins and map commonly used keystrokes to further increase efficiency, but when do I start to get diminishing returns? For example, I could map a letter to :GitGrep and save six keystrokes, but I haven't found the need to do that yet. Usually when I'm searching for something, I'm thinking about what I want to search for while typing the command, so I'm effectively multitasking and not wasting time with all that extra typing. Sometimes slowing down can be a good thing to allow that planning. Plus each new mapping or plugin is something new to learn, and it can occasionally become overwhelming with all the new options.

Just Right, For Now

I'll definitely continue to improve my Vim Fu, but I'm not in a hurry to continually add to my repertoire until I've mastered what I currently have available. I've come this far on a basic setup, and Vim has been around long enough that there have been many others who have gotten by with less, so I'm not going to stress out about not optimizing every single key I type.