Marcus Kazmierczak

Home mkaz.blog

Working With Vim

Plugin Management

I recommend using vim-plug to manage plugins, it makes it easy to install, update, and remove plugins. There are other plugin managers, but I've found vim-plug works best for me.

Install

Install by downloading plug.vim and placing it in your autoload directory. This directory is dependent on your install, it might be ~/.vim/autoload/ or for Neovim ~/.config/nvim/autoload/

Add a section to your .vimrc to specify the plugins to load. The plug#begin function may also specify what directory to download the plugins to. Here is an example specifying two plugins to use.

call plug#begin('~/.config/plugged')
    Plug 'fatih/vim-go'
    Plug 'mhartington/oceanic-next'
call plug#end()

The plugins are specified using their Github directory. So, the above fatih/vim-go plugin refers to the https://github.com/fatih/vim-go repository.

After updating .vimrc with a new or deleted plugin, you need to reload; it is easiest to just quit and restart vim. You can also run :source % to source your config when you are editing it, personally I prefer quit/restart, it's less typing.

After reloading, install the plugins using the command: :PlugInstall

Remove a Plugin

If you want to delete a plugin:

  1. Remove the line from your config,
  2. Quit and restart Vim, and then
  3. Run :PlugClean. You will be prompted to delete the directory, type Y.

If the above does not work for some reason, you can delete the directory manually from the ~/.config/plugged directory.

Update Plugins

Run :PlugUpdate to update all plugins.

Run :PlugUpgrade to upgrade vim-plug itself.

Documentation

See vim-plug repository for full documentation and features.