Essential First Plugins

Essential First Plugins

Resist the urge to install thirty plugins on day one. This set covers the highest-value ground:

Editing#

• vim-surround — ys, cs, ds to add, change, and delete surrounding quotes, brackets, and tags. The classic “how did I live without this.”
• nvim-treesitter — real syntax trees instead of regex highlighting. Better colors immediately; smarter text objects and folding later.

Git#

• gitsigns.nvim — live added/changed/removed markers in the sign column, plus hunk navigation and preview. Covered in depth in the Git Workflow chapter.

Finding things#

• plenary.nvim + telescope.nvim — fuzzy finding for files, text, and more. The modern config later replaces this with snacks.nvim’s picker, but telescope is the canonical starting point.

Quality of life#

• lualine.nvim — a status line that shows mode, branch, diagnostics, and position without any configuration.
• vim-fugitive — :G blame and friends; git as a first-class citizen.
• nvim-lspconfig / nvim-cmp — the doorway to the next chapter: language servers.

Every plugin here appears again, configured for daily use, in the complete setup — and the finished configuration is one clone away in the course companion repo.