plugwatch.nvim

Monitor all your (neo)vim plugins for updates.

About

Plugin managers for (neo)vim are plentiful and full-featured for the most part, but the one feature I've noticed is missing from all of them is an indicator that there are updates available for your plugins.

plugwatch ties into your plugin manager of choice, and gives you an indicator you can add your your statusline to show the number of updates available. It checks for updates on startup, and after your plugin manager installs updates.

Supported plugin managers are:

• packer.nvim
• vim-plug
• Vundle.vim*
• dein.vim*

*(Untested, but I think they should work. Let me know if it's not working for you.)

Installation

use {
    'loganswartz/plugwatch.nvim',
    requires = { 'nvim-lua/plenary.nvim' },
    config = function()
        require('plugwatch').setup()
    end,
}

Usage

All the plugins you use should be autodetected based on the plugin manager you are using, which is also autodetected. Plugins are checked on VimEnter, as well as on certain events (depending on the plugin manager). In most cases, this means the counter will update as soon as you run updates.

To add an indicator to your statusline, add a component that calls require('plugwatch').get_statusline_indicator. By default, it will look like this when update are found:

▲ 3

When no updates are found, nothing is shown.

Then, in your statusline use the indicator function provided by this repo:

require('plugwatch').get_statusline_indicator

To make a custom indicator, pass a make_indicator option to setup(). For example, if you wanted an indicator that showed a dot for every plugin with updates (ie. 4 plugins with updates becomes ....), it would look like this:

use {
    'loganswartz/plugwatch.nvim',
    requires = { 'nvim-lua/plenary.nvim' },
    config = function()
        require('plugwatch').setup({
            make_indicator = function(count, manifest)
                return string.rep('.', count)
            end
        })
    end,
}

count is the number of plugins that have updates, and manifest is the mapping of plugin names to the number of new commits found in that repo. Using the manifest value can give you much more granular information, should you need it. count is calculated by simply counting the number of non-zero entries in the manifest.

API

If you want more manual control, you can also use some global variables that are automatically updated on the fly:

-- a key-value table where:
--   key = name of the plugin
--   value = number of new commits detected
vim.g.plugwatch_updates

-- a number representing the total number of plugins that have at least one new
-- commit available
vim.g.plugwatch_updates_count

These are also available in Vimscript:

g:plugwatch_updates
g:plugwatch_updates_count

Additionally, the Lua API has some helper functions available:

-- The contents of vim.g.plugwatch_updates, but any plugins with 0 new commits
-- are filtered out.
require('plugwatch').plugins_with_updates()

-- manually kick off an update check (this is async; returns immediately).
require('plugwatch').check_for_updates()

Performance concerns

plugwatch shouldn't affect your startup time in any significant way, as all operations are done asynchronously. In fact, plugwatch started as a lua rewrite of a vimscript plugin that accomplishes similar goals, but with the intention of negating slow startup times that plagued that plugin.

The way plugwatch checks for updates is by finding the directories for your plugins via your plugin manager, and doing a git fetch to see if there are any new upstream commits. It does this fetch on startup, and also whenever has been configured via the setup_refresh function for your plugin manager. As far as I know, you should't need to worry about rate limits from Github or other upstream repo hosts. The limits are much higher than what this plugin would be able to do, even under the most extreme cases.

Is this available for regular Vim?

No, and I have no plans to add support. Lua is much more pleasant to write with than Vimscript, and I made this specifically for my usage of Neovim + packer.nvim.

Known issues

Semi-frequently, jobs will fail for 1 or 2 plugins in each check. I'm not sure why this is, and it's not consistent at all, in terms of what commands fail, or what folder it fails on, or even if it happens at all. If you have an idea, let me know by submitting an issue.