Supercharge Your Rust Development with Vim: A Minimalist Setup Guide

Optimizing Your Rust Development Experience with Vim

As a fan of Rust and lean, mean tools, you’re likely always on the lookout for ways to optimize your development experience. One way to achieve this is by using Vim as your main editor for Rust. In this article, we’ll explore how to configure Vim for Rust development, focusing on a minimalist setup that covers the basics and leverages the power of rust-analyzer.

Choosing the Right Plugins

Before diving into the configuration, let’s take a look at some essential plugins for Rust development in Vim:

• rust-analyzer: A frontend compiler for IDEs that provides features like smart autocompletion, auto-importing, and code assists.
• rust.vim: A plugin that provides syntax highlighting, formatting, and file detection for Rust files.
• coc.nvim: A completion plugin that supports LSP servers and provides a rich ecosystem of language server plugins.
• coc-rust-analyzer: A coc plugin that integrates rust-analyzer with coc.
• ALE: A plugin that provides asynchronous syntax checking, autofixing, and autocompletion.

Configuring Vim for Rust Development

Here’s an example configuration that uses vim-plug to install the necessary plugins:

“`vim
call plug#begin(‘~/.local/share/nvim/plugged’)
Plug ‘rust-lang/rust.vim’
Plug ‘neoclide/coc.nvim’, {‘branch’: ‘release’}
Plug ‘fannheyward/coc-rust-analyzer’, {‘do’: ‘yarn install –frozen-lockfile’}
Plug ‘dense-analysis/ale’
call plug#end()

” Configure automatic rustfmt setup
let g:rustfmt_autosave = 1

” Configure coc
inoremap
\ pumvisible() ? “<C-n>” :
\ checkbackspace() ? “<TAB>” :
\ coc#refresh()
inoremap pumvisible() ? “<C-p>” : “<C-h>”
“`

Evaluating the Configuration

With this configuration, you can expect the following features to work:

• Syntax highlighting and formatting for Rust files
• Autocompletion and code assists using rust-analyzer
• Asynchronous syntax checking and autofixing using ALE
• Go to definition and find references using rust-analyzer

Overall, this configuration provides a solid foundation for Rust development in Vim. By leveraging the power of rust-analyzer and other plugins, you can create a seamless and efficient development experience.