“VAM” is short name for vim-addon-manager. You declare a set of plugins. VAM will fetch & activate them at startup or runtime depending on your needs. Activating means handling runtimepath and making sure all .vim file get sourced.
set runtimepath+=/path/to/vam
call vam#ActivateAddons([list of addon names])
Keep reading to get an overview about VAM.
Skim this README.md file, look at the documentation at doc/ which will tell you how to contact us.
- Declarative: The behaviour of Vim is determined by your .vimrc only. [1]
- Automatic runtimepath handling: install/ update/ use manually installed addons on startup or load them lazily as needed when you feel that way. [3]
- Builtin dependency management. [2]
- Based on a pool of addons which is maintained by the community. This allows warning you if you’re going to install outdated packages. Of course you can opt-out and use your own pool easily.
- Sources from www.vim.org, git, mercurial, subversion, bazaar, darcs, [...]
- Addon name completion in .vim files and :(Update|Activate)Addons commands.
- Short syntax for github repos:
github:name/repo. - Optionally writes update logs.
- Cares about windows users.
- Addon info by name or script id (:AddonInfo).
- Tries to preserve user modifications by using diff/patch tools on unix like environments (for non-version-controlled sources).
- 100 % VimL (is this really that good?..)
[1]: assuming you always use latest versions
[2]: this serves the community by making it easy to reuse other’s code. Implemented by a addon-info.json file and patchinfo database for addons without VAM support.
[3]: Yes — there are some special cases where it does not work correctly because some autocommands don’t get triggered
Pool is made up of
- Plugins found on www.vim.org. List is updated by a cron job.
- Version controlled and non-www.vim.org sources. They are added manually, you can file a pull request if you want to add one.
- File with additional information augmenting sources: it has information with dependencies [4], corrects addon types and contains deprecations.
[4]: Plugin authors should use addon-info file instead. patchinfo.vim is for addons not supporting VAM.
VAM is well supported by at least 2 maintainers. Try github tickets or Vim irc channel on freenode.
However the “self install” alternative is recommended, see section 2 of GETTING STARTED
Here you go:
See contact information in GETTING STARTED documentation.
It’ll never have nice install progress bars — because the “progress” is not very well known because addons can be installed at any time — and additionall dependencies may be encountered.
If you want to be able to rollback you have to use git submodules yourself or find a different solution — because VAM also supports other VCS and installing from archives.
Also very famous:
debian’s vim plugin manager The author (Jamessan) is fine with this project sharing the same name.