Rubenerd

My recent post about vim-plug spawned a couple interesting discussions, including additional features and the need for plugin managers in light of Vim 8’s native plugin support.

Andrii Lytvyn emailed:

I’ve been using vim-plug for years now, but recently it came to my attention that starting from version 8 Vim (and Neovim) has it’s own barebones package managing system. As such, now Vim autoloads any plugins that you put in the ~/.vim/pack/*/start/ folder.

Andrii automates this with a few additional lines in vimrc to detect and install plugins, but otherwise runs Vim completely stock. This appeals to me for situations where I don’t have that many plugins.

Ben Oliver expands on one additional feature of vim-plug I didn’t realise:

The coolest thing about vim-plug (ok perhaps not cool) is that you can create a lockfile of all your plugins in their current state. So you run the install like you did already, then once you are happy everything is working:

:PlugSnapshot foo-bar.lock

Then if an update happens and something breaks, you can roll it back with (from CLI not vim)

vim -S foo-bar.lock

It’s also useful for deploying to multiple systems, instead of having different versions of plugins on different machines.