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What's the best way to manage Vim plugins? Some plugins use Vimball, but I read somewhere that it was seriously broken, and manually dropping each plugin into ~/.vim/ results in a mess of files that are near impossible to update or organise. Is there a plugin-manager for Vim that functions similarly to Linux package managers? Or can plugins be reorganised into their own directories to make administering them easier?

Robbie
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8 Answers8

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There is a new splendid tool, vundle, found here : https://github.com/gmarik/vundle

It is Awesome, like a wedding of pathogen with git.

Drasill
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    If you like vundle you should check out NeoBundle: https://github.com/Shougo/neobundle.vim. It's a fork of vundle that has more features and addresses some performance concerns. – Steve McKinney Nov 24 '12 at 06:14
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    But... What if the plugin doesn't exist in git... What if it is svn? or hg? – trusktr Apr 07 '13 at 08:23
  • Can vundle handle those cases? – trusktr Apr 07 '13 at 08:24
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    It seems it doesn't handle these cases. Most of the time, scripts are mirrored on http://vim-scripts.org/vim/scripts.html so that you only have to supply the script name in your vimrc. – Drasill Apr 08 '13 at 13:50
  • Even with its file:// syntax it still wants to fetch from github, which may be blocked in corporate networks... should use the .zip. – vesperto Oct 28 '16 at 16:13
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To reorganize plugins in their own directories, pathogen is quite popular.

See a blog post detailing the installation or a Vimcast from Drew Neil.

This is what I actually use. It basically puts each plugin in its separate directory, so you can easily add or remove them.

Xavier T.
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6

I personally prefer vim-addon-manager: it installs each plugin into separate directory, is able to download and update them. Documentation of vim-addon-manager contains some references to related projects, you may also want to try them.

ZyX
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1

Check out NeoBundle, the ultimate package manager for vim. It's a fork of Vundle.

trusktr
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Matthew Weier O'Phinney, PHP Zend Framework project lead, writes a little about it. Maybe you will find it useful: http://weierophinney.net/matthew/archives/249-Vim-Toolbox,-2010-Edition.html

greg606
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1

Pathogen has already been mentioned as a way of managing plugins.

A way of enhancing this is to add the extra plugins as git submodules (or whatever your VCS of choice is). This makes it easier to keep up to date, and easier to replicate when using other machines.

Here is an example from github.

Abizern
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I use this script for updating and removing vim pathogen plugins

a14m
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0

With NeoBundle fall Dein takes it place with features like:

  • being faster;
  • async support;
  • probably would add support for hg and svn.
kworr
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