If you want to start up vim without loading all the usual plugins, you can supply the --noplugin flag

$ vim --noplugin coffee.rb

You can take things even further by instead telling vim to open without loading any plugins or configuration files. That is, you can tell vim to skip all initializations.

$ vim -u NONE coffee.rb

If you are used to lots of syntax highlighting, custom bindings, and other niceties, this may feel rather foreign.

h/t Jake Worth