How does vim-pathogen make anything easier?

Question

If I understand it correctly, with pathogen it makes things easy because all you have to do to install/uninstall plugins is place or remove the plugin from a certain directory.

But isn't this what the plugin directory is for? How is it any better?

Answer 1

A plugin can be a single plugin_name.vim file that you toss into ~/.vim/plugin/. If every plugins were single files we wouldn't "need" any plugin management solutions.

But most plugins are actually collections of files that need to be placed in certain directories like ~/.vim/autoload/, ~/.vim/after/, ~/.vim/doc/ and so on. This has been considered "messy" for a while and Pathogen is one of many answers to this problem:

• Vimball :help vimball
• Vundle
• VAM
• VAM
• Unbundle
• possibly others…

If you don't think that it's a problem then you obviously don't need a solution (pathogen or whatever).

I think that it's a problem (I like my things well organized), Pathogen is the first solution I came across and it served me well.

Answer 2

It's better because you can store your plugin in isolation in the ~/.vim/bundle directory. That makes easier for you to have all your configuration directory under a version control system. Take a look at my vimfiles for example.

All the plugins I use are stored as a git submodule and this makes updates easy to handle. Furthermore, if you want to remove a plugin it's just a matter of removing the relative directory in the bundle one.