vim-awesome VS vim-startify

Vim is infinitely customizable. While Vscode allows you to change the app’s color scheme, install plugins, and change a few app settings, Vim offers you complete control over the editor’s experience. You have thousands of plugins to choose from. You can completely remap any keybinding and create new shortcuts for tasks in your daily workflow. And giving you more power as a developer, you can completely reprogram or automate your Vim experience with the built-in Vimscript language or Lua for Neovim.

This is a pretty good website for browsing vim plugins: https://vimawesome.com

VimAwesome is a website with a curated list of vim plugins. You can search by category or type for something that fits your needs. I highly recommend browsing the list just to see what there is.

I recently moved to Mac/OSX from Linux and have struggled with my vim setup. I found some installations bundles that attempt to set everything up for me, so I used one of those, iirc it is this one: https://vimawesome.com/ . However, I have some issues with it. While coding, I often want to jump around code blocks and I do so by taking advantage of the '{}' characters (curly braces) used for code blocks in the languages I use (javascript and C++). In vi, the '%' character can be used to jump between the matching curly brace. However, in my current setup, this does not work. How can I find how to make the '%' feature work again?

That is probably a couple of hours worth of work getting the plugins set up. Then you're in the wild west looking for things that are interesting. I suggest you stay as minimal as you can as long as you can, but there is plenty to find.

Find the desireable plug-ins from VIM Awesome this is one of the best places to find vim and neovim plugins. For this tutorial we will add couple of plug-ins to make our neovim look good and work like an ide.

Unfortunately not maintained anymore, but it updates automatically so is still somewhat useful.

Are you aware of https://vimawesome.com/ Makes it pretty easy to find plugins.

https://github.com/mhinz/vim-startify has also means to store sessions with command 'SSave'.

might be well known but i like https://github.com/mhinz/vim-startify easy to use start screen with most recently used lists of files, etc.

Startify

mhinz/vim-startify - Start page

I was trying to center the startup screen for vim-startify and went down the rabbit hole of looking for a different startup plugin. My main use is that I want to start my already existing startify sessions as everything else I do with Telescope. I found mini.starter and it is working exactly as I want it to so I thought I would share for others that look for something similar. Don't get put off by the many components of the plugin. They are not loaded if you don't need them. Here is my a screenshot and my config for a minimal, centered, startup:

I do restart vim when it's impossible to evaluate modified stuff in place to see the result immediatelly. Sometimes, when I have lots of buffers opened, need all of them and need to restart, a save a session with Startify :SSave command. On restart I press one key and have everything back.

I use Startify, which does a good job with sessions and gives you the ability to create bookmarks and display them on the start screen. My mappings to create a new window or tab always end with invoking Startify, so it is like the new tab screen that web browsers have, showing bookmarks and recent files.

Startify

I honestly still use vim-startify: I just have quick links to the most recently opened files, for all the rest I have fuzzy finders and commands in place, so I need not really have them "one click away" on the dashboard (I won't be using them from there anyway).

For your second problem. Personally, I use git worktree to work on different branches. In each work tree you can have a separate Session.vim file. You can create it manually with :mksession or use a plugin https://github.com/tpope/vim-obsession. You may find https://github.com/tpope/vim-projectionist useful too. IMO centralized management from inside Vim is not the way to go, but that's not the only point of view. There is https://github.com/mhinz/vim-startify for example.