After only a couple of days I did start finding git submodules annoying (again… who knew?). In order to get them out of my configs I’ve moved over from pathogen to Vundle. Pathogen lets all of your plugins behave like Mac Apps and line in their own little folders, instead of coexisting with other vim files in a single vim runtime folder (normally ~/.vim). Vundle takes this same approach but manages the git cloneing and updating of these plugins. So instead of autoloading whatever is in a folder, you define what plugins you want and are then able to install/update them from inside git.

Example .vimrc

Here is a relevant example from my current .vimrc:

" Runtime Path and Vundle {{{
" Use Vim defaults instead of trying for Vi compatibility
set nocompatible

" Adding runtimepath for windows so we can use .vim instead of _vim
if !exists("g:loaded_runtime")
  set runtimepath=~/.vim,$VIMRUNTIME,~/.vim/bundle/vundle,~/.vim/after
  let g:loaded_runtime = 1
endif

" Needed while loading bundles
filetype off

" Load vundle code call vundle#rc()

" Let vundle manage itself
Bundle 'gmarik/vundle'

" Bundles {{{
" Plugins
Bundle 'tpope/vim-fugitive'
Bundle 'tpope/vim-rails'

" Gui Plugins
if has("gui_running")
  Bundle 'bling/vim-airline'
endif
" }}}

filetype plugin indent on
" }}}

Line 3 and 12 need to be set in order for Vundle to properly install bundles. After any :Bundle commands you can turn filetype back on like I do on line 31.

Lines 6-9 are part of my windows setup. I want vim to use ~/.vim on windows instead of ~/_vim so I need to specify my runtimepath here in the form that I want it. You can see that I load my home directory, then any system plugins, then vundle, and finally my after directory (for overriding plugins).

Line 15 is what initializes vundle and lines 18-28 are me specifying what plugins I want. Since all of my plugins are installed from github it’s very easy to specify them in this way. I even only load airline if I’m in gui mode (line 26).

First time install

After clearing out my .vim/bundle folder I cloned the vundle repo:

git clone https://github.com/gmarik/vundle.git ~/.vim/bundle/vundle

After this I opened up vim and ran the :BundleInstall command which then checked out all of my plugins for me. When I want to update later on I can just run :BundleInstall!

If I want to remove a plugin I just remove the line from my .vimrc and then run :BundleClean

I did commit vundle itself to my home directory repo so I don’t need to git clone it on every new install. For my work computer tomorrow I will just update my home directory and then run :BundleInstall from inside of vim.

Easy!

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