How to use Tim Pope's Pathogen

gistfile1.md

How to use Tim Pope’s Pathogen

I’ll assume you are on Linux or Mac OSX. For Windows, replace ~/.vim/ with $HOME\vimfiles\ and forward slashes with backward slashes.

The idea

Vim plugins can be single scripts or collections of specialized scripts that you are supposed to put in “standard” locations under your ~/.vim/ directory. Syntax scripts go into ~/.vim/syntax/, plugin scripts go into ~/.vim/plugin, documentation goes into ~/.vim/doc/ and so on. That design can lead to a messy config where it quickly becomes hard to manage your plugins.

This is not the place to explain the technicalities behind Pathogen but the basic concept is quite straightforward: each plugin lives in its own directory under ~/.vim/bundle/, where each directory simulates the standard structure of your ~/.vim/ directory.

Let us take two simple, imaginary, plugins called foo and bar as an example. With the standard installation method we should have this mess:

~/.vim/doc/bar.txt
~/.vim/doc/foo.txt
~/.vim/plugin/bar.vim
~/.vim/plugin/foo.vim
~/.vim/syntax/bar.vim

With the help of Pathogen, we maintain the standard structure but we move it under ~/.vim/bundle/<pluginname>/:

~/.vim/bundle/bar/plugin/bar.vim
~/.vim/bundle/bar/syntax/bar.vim

~/.vim/bundle/foo/doc/foo.txt
~/.vim/bundle/foo/plugin/foo.vim

Now, our plugins are easy to delete, update or modify because they are carefully segregated from each other.

That mechanism also applies to single-file scripts but they require a bit more work.

1. Identify the nature of that script. Is it a generic plugin? A filetype plugin? A syntax script? Let us assume it is a syntax script.

2. Come up with a descriptive name for that single-file plugin, say baz.

3. Place your script in ~/.vim/bundle/baz/syntax/baz.vim.

Prepare your environment

If they don’t exist already, create these two directories:

~/.vim/autoload/
~/.vim/bundle/

Get Pathogen

Save https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tpope/vim-pathogen/master/autoload/pathogen.vim to

~/.vim/autoload/pathogen.vim

Configure Pathogen

Put these lines at the top of your vimrc:

execute pathogen#infect()

filetype plugin indent on
syntax on

The two last lines have nothing to do with pathogen but, if you have them in your ~/.vimrc, be sure to put them after the pathogen line. If you don’t have those lines, well… add them! What good is Vim without syntax highlighting and filetype detection?

Install a plugin

We are going to install delimitMate. Once it is installed in ~/.vim/bundle/, you should get:

~/.vim/bundle/delimitMate-master/autoload/...
~/.vim/bundle/delimitMate-master/doc/...
~/.vim/bundle/delimitMate-master/plugin/...
~/.vim/bundle/delimitMate-master/...

Manually:

Unzip delimitMate-master.zip in ~/.vim/bundle/delimitMate-master/.

With Git, no submodules:

$ cd ~/.vim/bundle
$ git clone https://github.com/Raimondi/delimitMate.git

With Git, using submodules:

Assuming your .vim directory is already a Git repository…

$ cd ~/.vim
$ git submodule init
$ git submodule add https://github.com/Raimondi/delimitMate.git bundle/delimitMate

All methods:

Once you are back in Vim, it is recommended to execute the :Helptags command, provided by Pathogen, to make the plugin’s documentation available globally:

:Helptags

Update a plugin

Manually:

Same as installation process.

With Git, with or without submodules:

$ cd ~/.vim/bundle/delimitMate-master
$ git pull

Both methods:

Use :Helptags to update the index of the plugin’s documentation.

Remove a plugin

Manually and with Git, no submodules:

Simply remove its directory from ~/.vim/bundle.

With Git, using submodules:

Assuming your .vim directory is already a Git repository…

$ cd ~/.vim
$ git submodule deinit -f bundle/delimitMate
$ git rm -rf bundle/delimitMate
$ rm -rf .git/modules/bundle/delimitMate

---

My Vim-related gists.

Hi @romainl,

I think the following step should also be added to the last section (removing plugins using submodules):

$ rm -rf .git/modules/bundle/delimitMate

Without this, I recently ran into a problem where I was trying to replace a copy of vim-vinegar with another fork; even though I was adding the new link, the old one was getting installed. Solution courtesy: https://shapeshed.com/vim-packages/

@manasthakur, sorry for the delay, I didn't receive any notification.

Anyway, I updated the gist. Thanks.

For a new .vim folder, I got the following error :
$ git submodule init
fatal: Not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git

May be you could add the below step for new comers
They need to run the below command :
$ git init

to fix the above error message

Thanks for the great gist!
Not too different, but why not update the "install delimitMate with git" command to:
git clone https://github.com/Raimondi/delimitMate.git ~/.vim/bundle

@asarfraaz, point taken. Git and Git submodules are beyond the scope of this Gist but I edited it lightly.

@zorawar87, that command wouldn't work as expected anyway. The following would:

$ git clone https://github.com/Raimondi/delimitMate.git ~/.vim/bundle/delimitMate

I've followed all the steps exactly but this isn't working for me. Maybe it's a problem with my version of vim? I'm using 8. Maybe I need to call something inside vim?

@HussarHussar , what OS are you using? And what exactly is "not working"? Please post an error message or something similar.

I've followed all the steps exactly but this isn't working for me. Maybe it's a problem with my version of vim? I'm using 8. Maybe I need to call something inside vim?

Vim 8 basically obsoletes pathogen. https://github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen even sais so on the very top of it's README.md.

I found this gist rather helpful:
https://gist.github.com/manasthakur/ab4cf8d32a28ea38271ac0d07373bb53