Vim - Plug-Ins

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Using plug-ins, we can extends the functionality of Vim. Vim supports many plug-ins and most of them are available freely. This chapter is about Vim plug-ins and we will discuss following items −

• Plug-in management
• Some useful plug-ins

Plug-in management

This section discusses plug-in management. Vim provides various plug-ins managers but we won’t be using any plug-in manager, instead we’ll be doing all these steps manually for better understanding. Once you understand these steps, you can go with plug-in manager.

Install plug-in

To install any plug-in perform following steps −

• Create .vim/bundle directory in user’s home directory
• Copy plug-in inside this directory
• Set runtimepath in vim

Let us install badwolf plug-in in Vim. It is a color scheme for vim.

$ mkdir -p ~/.vim/bundle 
$ cd ~/.vim/bundle/ 
$ git clone https://github.com/sjl/badwolf.git 
$ echo "set runtimepath^ = ~/.vim/bundle/badwolf" > ~/.vimrc

Now plug-in is installed, so we can use badwold color scheme as follows −

:colorscheme badwolf

Update plug-in

If we observe carefully, plug-in is a just collection of files and if we want to update that plug-in then just update appropriate plug-in directory from ~/.vim/bundle.

Remove plug-in

Removing plug-in in Vim is really simple. To remove plug-in perform following steps −

• Remove plug-in directory from ~/.vim/bundle
• Modify runtimepath appropriately

Some useful plug-ins

Below is list of some useful Vim plug-ins