It is Plugin that makes Vim colorful and easy to use. In this post I record my way of learning to use vim plugins managers.

Which one?

When I search the vim plugins manager on google, I found there are many good plugins managers. Here is the rank of “The best plugin managers for vim“ on Slant

I saw several wonderful vim plugin managers such as vim-plug, Vundle, Pathogen, Dein.vim and so on. They both have pros and cons, and after some investigation I finally decide to use vim-plug.

Here are some information about these plugin managers.

• Vim-plug

Pros:

1. Really light
2. Parallel plugin installation makes it really fast
3. On-demand loading for faster startup time

• Vundle

Pros:

1. Easy to use
2. Can find, install, update plugins automatically

Cons:

1. Old
2. Vimrc can get noisy
3. Slower if compared to vim-plug

• Pathogen

Pros:

1. Minimal additions to .vimrc file
2. More control over your plugins

Cons:

1. More manual work

• Dein.vim

Pros:

1. Fast

Cons:

1. Complex to set up/ understand
2. Limited documentation

And here is an article about vim plugins and startup time. The author conclude that

By not loading plugins that are not immediately needed, NeoBundle and vim-plug both managed to reduce the startup times by around 107ms. vim-plug now takes only 135ms to start.

Use vim-plug to manage plugins

The rest part are summaries for README on vim-plug github site.

Install

In Mac, it is really simple

$ curl -fLo ~/.vim/autoload/plug.vim --create-dirs \ 

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim

This command will download plug.vim and put it in the “$HOME/.vim/autoload” directory.

Usage Pipeline

The usage is really straightforward and simple. There are basically three steps.

1. Write Plug 'GitHub_postfix_of_the_plugin' in the .vimrc file between the line call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged') and the line call plug#end(). For more options, see “Plug options” section.

2. $ source ~/.vimrc or in vim run :source % to make the .vimrc works.

3. In vim, run :PlugInstall. It will open a new window and run things like these

For example,

I want to install vim-startify.

Once you have installed it, when you run $vim in your command line, it will show a page looks like this,

.

As the github site says:

It provides dynamically created headers or footers and uses configurable lists to show recently used or bookmarked files and persistent sessions. All of this can be accessed in a simple to use menu that even allows to open multiple entries at once.

For example, you can just type 0 and vim will open the corresponding file appears in the list. In the picture, it will open ~/.vim/bundle/vim-startify/README.md.

First go to the GitHub site of vim stratify, we can see the URL is <https://github.com/mhinz/vim-startify> so copy the postfix of URL “mhinz/vim-startify” to .vimrc file. Now the .vimrc looks like this

" Specify a directory for plugins
" - For Neovim: ~/.local/share/nvim/plugged
" - Avoid using standard Vim directory names like 'plugin'
call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged')

" vim startify
Plug 'mhinz/vim-startify'

" Initialize plugin system
call plug#end()

Then in vim, run :source % to make it work.

At last, in vim, run :PlugInstall to install the plugin.

Plug options

There are also some options you can choose when you install the plugins. Just put the options behind the Plug 'GitHub_postfix_of_the_plugin'

For example, for nerdtree plugin, you can use on-demanding loading for faster startup time.

" On-demand loading
Plug 'scrooloose/nerdtree', { 'on':  'NERDTreeToggle' }

NERD tree will be loaded on the first invocation of NERDTreeToggle command.

Or the plugin in inside the subdirectory of GitHub repo. You can use rtp to specify the subdirectory that contains vim plugin. For example, I want a color scheme and it is a colorscheme for many programs, so to specify the vim plugin, I use

Plug 'sonph/onehalf', {'rtp': 'vim/'}

It means the corresponding vim plugin is in the “vim/” directory.

There are some plugins that require extra steps after installation or update. In that case, use do option to describe the task to be performed.

Plug 'Shougo/vimproc.vim', { 'do': 'make' }
Plug 'Valloric/YouCompleteMe', { 'do': './install.py' }

If the value starts with :, it will be recognized as a Vim command.

Plug 'fatih/vim-go', { 'do': ':GoInstallBinaries' }

Option	Description
branch/tag/commit	Branch/tag/commit of the repository to use
rtp	Subdirectory that contains Vim plugin
dir	Custom directory for the plugin
as	Use different name for the plugin
do	Post-update hook (string or funcref)
on	On-demand loading: Commands or <Plug>-mappings
for	On-demand loading: File types
frozen	Do not update unless explicitly specified

Commands

There are some commands for vim-plug, I just copy it from the GitHub site.

For example, if you want to update vim-startify, in vim, type :PlugUpdate vim-startify Then it looks like this

Command	Description
PlugInstall [name ...] [#threads]	Install plugins
PlugUpdate [name ...] [#threads]	Install or update plugins
PlugClean[!]	Remove unused directories (bang version will clean without prompt)
PlugUpgrade	Upgrade vim-plug itself
PlugStatus	Check the status of plugins
PlugDiff	Examine changes from the previous update and the pending changes
PlugSnapshot[!] [output path]	Generate script for restoring the current snapshot of the plugins