General

• Use a plugin manager (my favorite one is vim-plug)
• Vim is not an IDE, just a text editor. Use shell tools and cli applications instead of stuffing everything into Vim (tmux can help with this)
• I prefer Neovim over Vim, the community drives new features (which only get accepted in Vim after Neovim has proven people want it, Vim's upstream is a bit stubborn) and some plugins that I use require extra dependencies in Vim but not in Neovim

Plugins

The following notation maps to GitHub. tpope/vim-surround can be found at https://github.com/tpope/vim-surround

Top Tier

Plugin	Description
tpope/vim-surround	edit/add/remove parentheses, brackets, (html) tags and more
tpope/vim-fugitive	Git
junegunn/fzf	Fast Fuzzy File Finder (also works outside of vim, e.g. when searching bash history

Nice to have Tier

Plugin	Description
tpope/vim-commentary	quickly (un)comment parts of code
tpope/vim-repeat	enhance repeat (with dot '.'), enabling it for plugins
tpope/vim-rhubarb	Add-on for vim-fugitive: Enable GitHub support (e.g. :Gbrowse opens current file on GitHub in the corresponding branch)
Shougo/deoplete.nvim	Async (important for performance!) compeletion manager that also supports Language Clients (has two more dependencies for regular Vim)
autozimu/LanguageClient-neovim	Support for Language Server <> Client communication (native implementation is WIP for Neovim)

If you like plugins Tier

Plugin	Description
tpope/vim-unimpaired	set of keybindings using [ and ] (e.g. [<SPC> to insert a blank line above, ]<SPC> to insert a blank line below)
tpope/vim-rsi	shell keybindings (e.g. C-W for delete-backwards)
tpope/vim-rails	Navigate Rails project easier

Plugins to avoid

Plugin	Description
NerdTREE	The shell has better file manipulation and FZF is better at opening files. Vim is not an IDE
powerline (or any other fancy status line)	Waste of resources and overwhelming with information. Built-in statusline can be adapted to fit your needs perfectly