A vim plugin that does nothing

Michael Bleuez -

In July 2021, I found myself puzzled while trying out a plugin. Run the command, silent crash. Friends were nearby, ensues the inevitable: "it's not a bug, it's a feature".

Well now it's a feature. Turns out, curiously, that nobody had done it before, so I made a complete plugin out of nothing, one that would do nothing. Though, as a contributor raised:

"In doing nothing, you are doing something"

And, as great minds think alike, only a few hours later and apparently without prior relation, @tjdevries (a neovim core dev) created his own repo of a more general-purpose nothingness art piece, tjdevries/literally_empty His repo is quite minimalistic, clearly 'emptier' than mine though I feel like I have the upper hand in some ways:

  • Actually a vim/neovim plugin. Do one thing and do it well
  • Features  exhaustively covered by documentation

But we share more similarities than differences

  • Fastest startup times
  • Cross-platform (OS, architecture, vim/neovim)
  • Features
  • Resource usage
  • Stable & feature-complete
  • Ready to use, no configuration required

Quite ridiculously, do-nothing.vim attracted 65 github stars and 3 contributors (more than all but one of my projects at the time), earning me the right to apply for a "plugin dev" tag on the neovim subreddit.