Vimscript New Hope: Configure plug-ins with Pathogen

Vim's plug-in configuration makes sense when you just add a file to customize your Vim experience, but it can be a mess when you want to use plug-ins written by someone else.

In the past, to use plug-ins written by someone else, you had to download all the files and place them correctly one by one. You may also zip tar to do placement work for you.

There are some obvious problems in this process:

• What do you do when you want to update the plug-in? You can overwrite an old file, but if the author deletes a file, how do you know you want to delete the corresponding file manually?
• What if two plug-ins use exactly the same file utils.vim or something more popular)? S ometimes you can simply rename it off, but what if autoload/ other name-related folder? I f you change the file name, you change the plug-in. It's not fun at all.

People sum up a series of hacks to make things easier, such as Vimball. F ortunately, we no longer have to put up with these dirty hacks. ated the famous Pathogen plug-in to make managing a large number of plug-ins easy and enjoyable, as long as the plug-in author is conscious of arranging the plug-in structure. (Translation: vundle is now recommended to replace Pathogen, which supports the use of git download plug-ins)

Let's take a look at how Pathogen works and what we need to do to make our plug-ins more compatible.

The run-time path

When Vim looks for files in a special folder, such as syntax/ it doesn't just look up in a single place. Like PATH on a Linux/Unix/BSD PATH Vim sets runtimepath find the files to load.

Create a colors desktop. C reate a file called mycolor.vim folder (in this example you can leave it empty). Open Vim and execute this command:

:color mycolor

Vim will display an error because it doesn't know how to look up your desktop. Now execute this command:

:set runtimepath=/Users/sjl/Desktop

Of course, you have to modify the path name according to your situation. Now try the color command again:

:color mycolor

This time Vim found mycolor.vim it will no longer report errors. Since the file is empty, it doesn't actually do anything, but since it's no longer wrong, we're sure it's found.

Pathogen

The Pathogen plug-in automatically adds paths to your runtimepath Vim. A ll ~/.vim/bundle/ be added to runtimepath one by one. That's what vundle did.

This means bundle/ include some or all of the standard Vim plug-in colors/ syntax/ Vim can now load files from each folder, and each plug-in file is independent of its own folder.

It's much easier to update the plug-in. A ll you need to do is remove the old plug-in folder and usher in a new version. I f you manage the ~/.vim folder through version control (which you should), you can use Mercurial's subbrepo or Git's submodule feature to check out the code base for each plug-in directly, and hg pull; hg update or git pull origin master to update.

Become Pathogen compatible

We plan to have our users install the Potion plug-in we wrote through Pathogen. W hat we need to do: Put our files in the right folder in the plug-in's code base. It's as simple as that!

The code base for our plug-in looks like this when expanded:

potion/
    README
    LICENSE
    doc/
        potion.txt
    ftdetect/
        potion.vim
    ftplugin/
        potion.vim
    syntax/
        potion.vim
    ... etc ...

We place it on GitHub or Bitbucket so that users can simply clone it bundle/ everything goes well!

Practice

If you haven't installed it yet, install it. (The original text is to install Pathogen, but it is not necessary)

Create a Mercury or Git code base for your plug-in, potion You can put it where you like it and link it to ~/.vim/bundle/potion/ just put it directly at ~/.vim/bindle/potion/

Create README and LICENSE files in the LICENSE base, and then comet.

Push to Bitbucket or GitHub.

Read :help runtimepath .