Vplinst stands for "VIM plugin installer" and is an attempt to make an automatic plugin installer for Vim.
It consists in awk and sh scripts, that almost match POSIX and may run in any UNIX operating system with /bin/sh and awk.
Provide a simple script (which interpreters on a Unix system base, like sh and awk) to install automatically a set of plugins, from a configuration file.
There is a configuration file called vplinst.conf where you specify plugin
information, like its name, url, id, etc. Check the Vplinst configuration
page section for more information.
Also, there is a awk script called download.awk, which downloads the
plugins and call setup.sh, that installs plugins in your ~/.vim
directory, or wherever you specify.
You might not call setup.sh directly, because it is called from the
download.awk script, after parsing the vplinst.conf file. So, to make
Vplinst work call:
awk -f download.awk extensions.conf
The vplinst.sh script already does that.
TODO: yeah, this is lacking. Check out vplinst.conf for examples.
Why I didn't use any of these projects? Here I write down the reasons:
GetLatestVimScripts and Download Vim Scripts as Cron Task get the latest version of a script and downloads it, but they do not install it. Although I didn't think about integrating Vplinst with these scripts, that might be a fine idea for the future.
Vimana seems to be a great application and a full-featured plugin manager, so the reasons that I didn't use it deserve a detailed explanation:
- It depends of dozen of Perl extensions that I found difficult to install with a broken internet connection and are not guaranteed to work on now GNU/Linux systems, just because authors don't test their libraries there;
- Also, although Perl is almost ubiquitous, it is not omnipresent as
/bin/sh; - Vimana requires that plugins put a comment in the form
" ScriptType: [script type]on its body, but not all define that; - There seem to be documented features and options, but some doesn't seem
to work (like the
--force (-f)option.
There is, though, some good reasons why I should use it:
- It seem to be a full-featured package manager for Vim plugins;
- It gets the latest Vim plugins;
- Very well documented and very mature.
For these good reasons this is a good project that I can use and hack when I have time. When this time comes, Vplinst will be considered obsolete.
I didn't touch vim-addon-manager so much, but I thought it confusing and bad documented, so I soon abandoned it.