Vim with (almost) no plugins
Created: 2023-02-27Back to vim.
On performing a fresh Slackware install today, I got caught by the GitHub removal of Vundle:
I couldn’t install my Vim plugins the way I’ve been doing for years!
This has caused me to take a hard look at the Vim plugins I was using. Turns out I only needed one, vviki, which I wrote.
So I’ve removed the others and now I’m storing just vviki in the horrible "vanilla" Vim plugin scheme and putting that in my dotfile management. Worse, but better.
(Note that I am still stuck on Vim 7.4 on one machine for the moment,
so I can’t use the new Vim 8.0 .vim/pack/* directory.)
That’s one less dependency and one less step in my setup.
To remind myself how to install Vim plugins the horrible way without plugins, I turned to my favorite source, Steve Losh’s "Learn Vimscript the Hard Way", only to find that it was down at the regular URL:
But here I was okay because I love and use that resource so much, I bought his book as a hardback from Leanpub. So I just had to go find it on my computer bookshelves. Boom, Chapter 42: Plugin Layout in the Dark Ages.
The moral of the story is that third-party dependencies will always let you down eventually. And paper books may have problems, but they never go offline.