vim: switching from vundle to the minpac plugin manager

Let’s geek out over Vim once more. So Vundle, the package manager I was using until now, suddenly broke on me. It hasn’t been updated for a long time, so it was bound to happen I guess. Vim now has a plugin/package managing thing built-in, but it still requires manually adding packages to the file system with Git and stuff like that, so… booooring.
I wanted something sweet and sassy I can use from Vim itself, but also use the new package system introduced in Vim 8.

Tadaaaa, here’s Minpac! A minimal package manager using the Vim 8 package system (but you guessed that by now if you read the intro).
So how did I do the transition?

My Vundle setup looked like this:

• I have a vundle.vim file, which has all the Vundle initialization code, and adds the plugins.
• I source that in my _vimrc.
• My vim dot files (in ~/vimfiles) are in a GitHub repo, that I sync between my laptops (work & home mostly)

That’s basically it. I then used to run the VundleUpdate command if I want to sync and add missing plugins.

So here’s how I switched to Minpac:

• I copied the old Vundle config into a minpac.vim file.
• Then I renamed all the Plugin 'author/plugin.vim' statements to minpac#add('author/plugin.vim'). Using some :%s-fu to get that done, of course.
• I had to find the repos for all the plugins that I got from Vimscripts directly. Minpac doesn’t support Vimscripts as a source, but I find a dedicated GitHub repo for most. For some old ones, there’s the vim-scripts mirror on GitHub, but that isn’t updated anymore, so your millage may vary.
• Then I sourced the new minpac.vim file instead of the vundle.vim file.
• I also had to install Minpac, as instructed in the readme, which basically means cloning the repo to pack\minpac\opt\minpac
• Now it’s time to restart Vim, and run call minpac#update() to get all the packages fresh.

At this point, you can delete the bundle subfolder in your vimfiles folder, where Vundle stores the plugins.

The switch was easier than I expected. I also get the impression Minpac is faster than Vundle, which is nice. But that could just be the Vim 8 package system itself, I’m not sure.

So to recap, some observations on Minpac:

• Minpac doesn’t have a search command to find plugins, so you have to find the packages using VimAwesome oslt.
• It can’t work with anything but GitHub repositories, but since most plugins are hosted there, that isn’t a problem, really.
• It’s fast.
• It uses Vim’s built-in package system. I’m hoping this means we’ll get more benefits from this with new Vim versions.

The post vim: switching from vundle to the minpac plugin manager appeared first on n3wjack's blog.