Vim with (almost) no plugins
Page created: 2023-02-27 , updated: 2023-06-16Back 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.)
UPDATE: I’ve updated Vim, but the old directories still work, so I’m not touching anything.
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.
Related: vim-mini-plugins.