Vim Plugins: EasyMotion - Good or bad practice?

Question

I am a plugin lover, and apart from the time spent learning the Vim editor, I also try my best in mastering its plugins. However, if a plugin forces me to unlearn Vim-specific habits & commands, I generally try to avoid them.

This brings me to the topic of EasyMotion.
The plugin revolves around the concept of visual navigation, and provides the user with several visual textual tags to which the user may jump.

Now what I am getting at: Is this good practice? Because it sure feels to me like it attempts to replace some very basic Vim skills & habits. Examples are:

• Writing quick search queries & regexes
• Practicing eye coordination with boundary-jumps (say 4w, 2E, 14j for example)

It is the single installed plugin I have refrained from using due to this uncertainty, although this discussion could easily be applied to most plugins in some degree.

Answer 1

There's no standardized "best practice", if that's what you are after. There's only "what works for me". Well… and "what bloggers say and commenters repeat" but that's usually worthless.

If you don't like how it works and/or it doesn't provide you any benefit, don't use it. It's that simple.

I don't like EasyMotion because the red characters and the overall dimming make me actually loose my target and I have to re-scan its area to find my target again. It may not be bad design generally speaking (I think it is), but for me it doesn't work at all so I don't use it. Simple.

What works for me is /foo and ?bar in combination with set incsearch. That's what I use hundreds of times a day. Simple.

Because the default feature works for me I don't have to look for a solution.

And the corollary: there's no use looking for a problem when you find a shiny new solution.