Plugin manager

Plugins are a really exciting way we can extend the base functionality of Vim.

We will use plugins to implement 2 features

• color themes
• a file explorer

We will use a plugin manager called VimPlug (vim-plug) to manage our plugins. There are other plugin managers, such as Pathogen and Vundle, but VimPlug is great.

It is minimalist, with parallel downloading and dynamic plugin loading. There is a good discussion here.

You can access its documentation here.

plug.vim

We need to copy a file called plug.vim from vim-plug, and place it into the configuration directory for Neovim.

We can do this manually, but we will use the command line:

curl -fLo ~/.config/nvim/autoload/plug.vim --create-dirs \
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim

Update .vimrc

Now, we need to tell Vim that we are using vim-plug as the plug-in manager

Add this to the top of .vimrc

call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged')

" We will list our plugins here

call plug#end()

Now we need to save and reload vim with our new config

:w
:so %

Done!

Let's confirm that we have installed vim-plug properly:

:PlugInstall

We get this message:

No plugin to install

This is fine! We will be installing plugins in the section.

Tab Completion

Tab completion works with plugins too.

:Plug<TAB>

Vim displays all the commands for vim-plug (which all start with Plug):

Plug PlugClean PlugDiff

Plug Status

Let's run the PlugStatus command using tab-completion:

As a reminder, here is a mapping of the keystrokes and their effect:

:Plug<TAB>                    Shows a list of all commands starting with Plug>
          S                   Shows a list of all commands starting with PlugS
           <TAB><TAB>         Tab across to PlugStatus
                     <Enter>  Execute PlugStatus

We can close that status window by pressing q (abbreviation for quit).

Tidy .vimrc

Let's add some comments and compartmentalize our .vimrc