Question

I have found some threads on this but they are three years old. Does anyone have a plugin to recommend for Vim, so that when I type {,
it will do:

{
::cursor here::
}

Another helpful thing would be to have

if(::cursor here::)

after typing if.

Answer 1

Check out snipMate plugin. It is very customizable. There is a excellent screen-cast showing the plugin in action.

For example in C with snipMate plugin.

if<Tab>

would produce:

if (::cursor:1::) {
    ::cursor:2::
}

First <Tab> would leave the cursor at ::cursor:1:: and second <Tab> would take you to ::cursor:2::.

There should be some thing similar for bash scripts in snipMate, if not it is very simple to add one.