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July 13, 2013

I have been using Vim (almost exclusively) with for 5 years now, with my vimfiles saved along with my dotfiles and personal keys on a private git repository. This is a folder that I have build over past couple of years, adding plugins and tricks as and when I found them. In all those years, I dont think I ever upgraded any of the plugins - as it just felt like a hassle. I knew about Vundle and Pathogen for a long time and it was always in my radar to try one of the out.

Last weekend, I finally took the plunge and setup a test VM to try it out and it has just been a pleasure. Barring, two issues:

vundle was setup with all my existing plugins and keymappings in less than an hour.

Though, I stumbled upon more issue when I cloned the new repository to an existing machine to see how easy it is to setup. Unfortunately, I think I had my submodules setup incorrectly and thus no checkouts were ever succesful. Scouring the web to see how others have solved their issues, I realised there seems to be couple of ways that people like to do it. This is how I am doing it.

Separate out vim into its own repository. My vimfiles. I changed the .vimrc to be just vimrc.
In your dotfiles, .vimrc, have:

if filereadable(expand("~/.vim/vimrc"))
  source ~/.vim/vimrc
endif

assuming you cloned your vimfiles to ~/.vim. Another important part of code is to ignore the bundle folder