Installing plugins

This chapter will start by introducing Vim plugins. Plugin management is a rather broad subject (and it's covered in Chapter 3, Follow the Leader - Plugin Management, as well), but we're starting out with just a few plugins, so we won't have to worry ourselves with that topic yet.

First, let's go through the one-time set up:

1. You'll need to create a directory to store plugins. Execute the following on the command line:

$ mkdir -p ~/.vim/pack/plugins/start

1. You'll want to tell Vim to load documentation for each plugin, as it doesn't do so automatically. For that, add the following lines to your ~/.vimrc file:

    packloadall           " Load all plugins.
    silent! helptags ALL  " Load help files for all plugins.

Now, every time you want to add a plugin, you'll have to:

1. Find your plugin on GitHub. For example, let's install https://github.com/scrooloose/nerdtree. If you have Git installed, find the Git repository URL (in this case, it's https://github.com/scrooloose/nerdtree.git) and run the following:

$ git clone https://github.com/scrooloose/nerdtree.git     ~/.vim/pack/plugins/start/nerdtree

1. Restart Vim, and the plugin should be available to use.