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Comment by lparry | Hacker News Reader

I love vim to bits, but can't believe that plugins are still such a mess. Why haven't they just rolled tpope's Pathogen into the standard vim distribution yet?

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Have you tried Vundle? I found it about a week after I got into vim and it was pretty easy and accessible.

I havent tried Vundle, but looking at their github the search and installation stuff looks pretty cool. I'll probably stick with Pathogen though since it's already setup and working.

I just feel really bad for anyone who hasn't started using a plugin-manager with vim, and think it's crazy that this functionality isn't built in yet. Smooshing everything in together in ~/.vim was/is so archaic

What mess? Unpack tar, mv files to vim/plugin or vim/doc. Easy to do, easy to undo, works well with versioning.

Compare that to Pathogen:

  To install:
    1) untar/git-clone/whatever
    2) there is no 2.
  To uninstall:
    1) rm -Rf foo
    2) there is no 2.

I never tried pathogen, it is probably very useful but in the example you give I have no idea about where my plugin is plugged, so I don't know how to rm it if needed.

By default it uses ~/.vim/bundle/ Just drop directories into there to install and [re]move them to uninstall.

It really is a thing of beauty.

    let g:pathogen_disabled = []

makes an exclusion list to disable without actually removing a plugin.

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