Manage Vim Plugin

Question

What is 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 / leads to a mess of files that are almost impossible to update or organize. Is there a plugin manager for Vim that works similar to Linux package managers? Or can plugins be reorganized into their own directories to simplify administration?

Answer 1

To reorganize plugins in their own directories, the pathogen is quite popular.

See a blog post for a detailed description of the installation or Vimcast by Drew Neal.

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

Answer 2

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

This is awesome , like a pathogen wedding with git.

Answer 3

I personally prefer vim-addon-manager : it installs each plugin in a separate directory, is able to download and update them. The vim-addon-manager documentation contains some links to related projects, you can also try them.

Answer 4

Matthew Weyer O'Pinnie, PHP Zend Framework Project Manager, writes a little about it. Maybe you find this useful: http://weierophinney.net/matthew/archives/249-Vim-Toolbox,-2010-Edition.html

Answer 5

The pathogen has already been mentioned as a way to manage plugins.

A way to enhance this is to add additional plugins as git submodules (or whatever your choice of VCS). This simplifies updating and facilitates replication when using other machines.

Here is an example from github.

Answer 6

Give up NeoBundle , the ultimate package manager for vim. This is a Vundle plug.

Answer 7

I use this script to update and remove vim pathogen plugins

Answer 8

With NeoBundle fall Dein takes this place with features such as:

• faster,
• async support;
• may add support for hg and svn .