Packman.vim is my simple Vim plugin/package manager. The ".vim" part of the name is a bit misleading, as it's really just a shell script.
Why not use one of the many existing plugin managers? Well, I don't like stuffing my Vim full of things I rarely use and would prefer to use an external tool.
As the name hints, it relies on Vim's
packages feature. At
the time of writing, this is a relatively new feature that may not be available
on your Vim. Use :echo has('packages') to find out. You can use
pathogen to simulate this feature if
your Vim is missing it.
Using packman is simple: define the plugins you want in packman.conf and run
it to install new plugins and update existing ones. Packman will try to load
the configuration file from ~/.vim/packman.conf or packman.conf in the the
current directory.
Here's what ./packman.sh -v will tell you:
./packman.sh [mode]
mode can be:
version Show last commit for all installed plugins.
install Install new plugins; don't update existing.
update Update existing plugins; don't install new.
orphans Remove 'orphaned' packages no longer in the config.
If no mode is given it will install new plugins and update existing plugins.
That's all.
I'll be honest: packman is not perfect: it's very simple and only does the bare minimum, is probably not the fastest tool out there due to lack of parallelisation, and doesn't support anything other than GitHub.
For most people, that's actually just fine. It is for me, anyway. I've never checked out a specific tag of a plugin, and waiting an extra 30 seconds is perfectly fine if that will save us a lot of complexity. I also can't remember the last time I used a Vim plugin that's not on GitHub; I dislike git, but for better or worse, it's the de-facto standard.