Vimogen is a light-weight and super easy way to install, remove, and update Vim plugins -- and to keep them synchronized (and up-to-date) on different machines.

Requiring no configuration other than a manifest file, vimogen is essentially a Pathogen bundle manager (you are using Pathogen aren't you?) that manages the installing/deleting/updating of all your Vim add-ons.

I created Vimogen because many plugins that I use, such as vim-rails, syntastic and snipMate-snippets, get new changes all of the time and I wanted an easy way to keep my copies up-to-date. I also wanted something that didn't clutter up my vimrc file.

How Vimogen works...

Simply create a manifest file in your home directory called .vimogen_repos (or let vimogen generate one for you) and put Git URLs to Vim plug-in repos inside of it -- one line at a time -- like:

git://github.com/tpope/vim-sensible.git
git://github.com/tpope/vim-surround.git
git://github.com/tpope/vim-repeat
git://github.com/scrooloose/nerdtree.git
git://github.com/tpope/vim-git.git
git://github.com/tsaleh/vim-matchit.git
git://github.com/tomasr/molokai.git
...

Don't worry, finding Git URLs for all of your plugins is actually very easy because vim.org mirrors them all on git hub here.

Running the vimogen command will give you the option to install, update, or uninstall of the cool Vim plugins and color schemes that you use.

A Unix-like system (Linux, OS X, etc.) running the Bash shell.

Vim and the Pathogen plugin.

Git.

So it will not work if you use Windows or Zsh, for example. Feel free to fork it and make it work on Windows or other shells besides bash if you want to, though!

Installation is optional and is as simple as installing a shell script.

Create a manifest file called $HOME/.vimogen_repos that consists of just git repositories. I supplied a ample .vimogen_repos file which contains the plugins that I like to use; make up your own, though.

Note that Vimogen wil auto-enerate $HOME/.vimogen_repos if you run it without creating the file first. It will genereate it based off the current pathogen bundles you already have, if any. This allows you to update or uninstall any existing plugins you have. You will only need to edit .vimogen_repos yourself when you want to install more plugins.

Then:

git clone git://github.com/rkulla/vimogen.git
chmod u+x vimogen.sh
cp vimogen.sh ~/bin/vimogen 

or put it somewhere else in your $PATH if you don't like ~/bin.

Run vimogen without arguments:

$ vimogen

It will give you a menu of items to choose from:

1) Install
2) Uninstall
3) Update
4) Exit
Enter the number of the menu option to perform:

For example, typing 1 will install all the plugins listed in .vimogen_repos.

• If you choose Install, then it will a git clone on all the git repositories that you specified in /.vimogen_repos into your Pathogen dir (/.vim/bundle). It will skip any directories that already exist. You can also append new plugin repos to the .vimogen_repos file later and install them incrementally by re- running Vimogen's install command.

• If you choose Uninstall, it will give you a list of all your plugins to choose from:

  1) EXIT                  8) tabular             15) vim-matchit
  2) ctrlp                 9) taglist             16) vim-rails
  3) dbext                10) tComment            17) vim-repeat
  4) nerdtree             11) tlib_vim            18) vim-snipmate
  5) pydiction            12) vcscommand          19) vim-surround
  6) python-mode          13) vim-addon-mw-utils  20) ZenCoding
  7) snipmate-snippets    14) vim-jade
  Enter the number of the plugin you wish to uninstall:
  

• If you choose Update, then it will run a git pull on all of your bundles. This is great because you can stay up-to-date with all the new features the plugin authors create just by re-running this command often.

Q: What is pathogen?

A: Pathogen has become the de-facto standard way of activating Vim plugins that were installed in modular way into their own directories, rather than unzip'ing all plugins into the same directory. Vimogen assumes that you are using Pathogen, so install Pathogen first, which is as easy as following the simple steps here.

Q: Where can I find git URLs for Vim plugins?

A: All of the plugins from vim.org are mirrored on https://github.com/vim-scripts

Q: I downloaded a Vim plugin as a .zip file. What should I do?

A: Delete it. Vimogen doesn't use zip files, it uses git repositories. All of the plugins from vim.org are mirrored on https://github.com/vim-scripts so find it on there and put the remote repository URL into ~/.pathogen_repos. If a plugin you want is not mirrored, i's probably still somewhere on github or somewhere if you search for it.

Q: What is this $HOME/.vimogen_repos file about?

A: It is simply a text file that consists of git URLs to the Vim plugins you want to install. If you don't have any new plugins you wish to install, you can still use vimogen to update or uninstall your existing plugins as long as they were installed as Pathogen bundles. Vimogen will look in your bundle directory and generate a $HOME/.vimogen_repos for you the first time you run it. Note that for this to work your existing bundles must also contain git repositories.

Q: What if I use different plugins depending on what operating system I'm using at any given time?

A: You can either create a different .vimogen_repos file for each machine or you can use the same one and just use 'if' conditions to check what platform you're on in your .vimrc file. See my vimrc for examples.

Q: Can Vimogen install Vim color schemes, like Molokai?

A: Absolutely. Anything that works with Pathogen (which is almost everything) will work with Vimogen.

Q: I already use Dropbox (or similar) to keep my .vim/ directory synchronized. Why do I need something like Vimogen?

A: Even if you've created a symlink from ~/.vim/ to ~/Dropbox/path/to/.vim/, that will only help you keep your existing versions of plugins synchronized. Vimogen allows you to also automatically pull from all your plugins' git repositories in order to keep them up-to-date by starting vimogen and typing 3 to run the updater.

Q: What does zero-configuration mean?

A: I mean it in the sense of not having to modify your vimrc file at all in order to use Vimogen. To be fair, if you don't already have Pathogen installed then adding a one line configuration that it requires to your vimrc is still necessary. Also, if ~/bin isn't in your system $PATH yet you'll need to add it in your bashrc, or equivalent, but that is more of an optional installation step.

Q: Is Vimogen really the easiest way to manage Vim plugins?

A: You tell me. I evolved the way I was handling it into this script. Vimogen doesn't require adding anything to your .vimrc file or .vim directory.

There are other ways to handle the automation of installing Vim plugins via pathogen -- such as making your entire .vim directory a git repo and then making the plugin directories git submodules. There are also other plugin managers such as Vundle that may have more options but also require configuration. I find Vimogen to be the easiest method I've seen.

Copyright (c) Ryan Kulla. Distributed under the same terms as Vim itself. See :help license