I feel like I have to migrate to a new (Neo)Vim package manager about once every 3 or so years. I think my path has been: pathogen -> Vundle -> vim-plug -> lazy.nvim. Hopefully, this the last VIM package manager?
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Plug still gets the job done imo. But I'm also hopeful that since this one is builtin to the language it'll likely be end-game worthy for lots of users. I have tried it out and had a painless experience though I never did anything fancy like lazy offered.
Luckily this is the built in, official, blessed one. So it’s likely going to be the most widely supported and available. (Maybe not most feature rich though)
Lazy.nvim seems pretty triumphant. But yeah a lot of others are also supported by various plugins. Some unity would be nice, abstractly. But man, it's hard to have faith we're going to get as anything good fast and reliable as lazy.nvim. it could happen though!
Every plugin manager I've used since Pathogen has seemed "triumphant" at the time. I think they've all been reliable enough and everytime I think well this will be the last time I change that.
I currently have a Packer config on one machine and Lazy on another and honestly don't know why I bothered switching to Lazy. What I really crave is simplicity so if NeoVim builds every thing in I think it will be good enough for me.
I switched from packer to lazy after I noticed the maintainer of packer stopped using packer in his neovim config. Also I believe he has now officially marked it as unmaintained and recommends lazy or pckr
I started using nixvim. I think I gave up around vim-plug. Trying to maintain reliably working config across multiple machines and OS was a nightmare.
Nixvim is great. I got it configured with a flake and add it to all my machines. Nix lang is really suitable to composing neovim config.
Yup, I have a giant flake that configures all of my home linux and macos machines. Every machine gets more or less the same home-manager configuration applied, nixvim is split into its own flake.
I've been using the "old school" approach of just leveraging neovim + huge list of `vimPlugins` in my Nix config, makes you about the myriad of package managers for vim/neovim.
Replacing it with nixvim is on my forever growing todo list.
I tossed pathogen in favor of git submodules in ~/.vim/pack/*/start/ in 2017 and it's still like that.
same here - works great and never needed anything else.
Same. I love vim and have no plans to leave, but I have no interest in being on the upgrade treadmill when my current system isn't broken. I've also had plugin updates break stuff, and it's a simple rollback in git back to a working state. I'm not sure how hard that is with these various plugin managers, but it's quite simple with git and I don't have to learn yet another tool/way of doing things.
Just looked at my (private) dotfiles git history
- pathogen in 2011
- vundle in 2013
- vim-plug in 2017
Haven't moved since, Plug still does the job, even after I moved to neovim in 2021. Will probably move to the new built-in package manager once the dust has settled.
in Nix it's the same for as long as I remember, both on NixOS and nix-managed home-manager on MacOS and Linux:
neovim = {
enable = true;
vimAlias = true;
vimdiffAlias = true;
defaultEditor = true;
plugins = [
pkgs.vimPlugins.fugitive
pkgs.vimPlugins.fzf-vim
pkgs.vimPlugins.vim-gh-line
pkgs.vimPlugins.vim-gutentags
pkgs.vimPlugins.nvim-lspconfig
pkgs.pkgs-unstable.vimPlugins.vim-go
pkgs.pkgs-unstable.vimPlugins.zig-vim
];
extraConfig = builtins.readFile ./vimrc;
extraLuaConfig = builtins.readFile (pkgs.replaceVars ./dev.lua {
inherit (pkgs) ripgrep;
}).outPath;
}This is the FOMO speaking. You don't have to switch if you don't want to.
+1. Configured my plugins years ago and have not cared about the mechanism at all. I might even have confused things and landed on two. Whatever. The result is what matters: I have extensions.
In the exceedingly-rare event I do want to add one... overwhelmed with choice. "Have to" is entirely self-imposed
New package manager is pretty slow right now, it's like 200ms to load nvim with lazy vim vs 1 sec with Pack.
How many plugins do you have?
22
I’m literally just using git with vim.
Me too. I don’t understand why people think they need plugin managers. I just git clone the plugin into blah/blah/start and if I feel like updating one I do a git pull.
How do you keep your plugins up to date?
Why would you want to keep your plugins up to date? How do you prevent breakage?
I update my plugins when I want/need to.
Exactly. I update if I want a new feature or bug fix, but other than that I love the predictability of knowing nothing has changed, and when it does, exactly what changed. Being able to `git diff` and see what's new is wonderful
I recently switched to lazy because I wanted to experiment with some more complex plugins, but the answer is just: I didn't keep them up to date. If you're using basic text-oriented stuff like fzf or surround how often is it going to improve in a meaningful way once it has reached its fully-formed state? If it did get a noticeable update its probably more likely to annoy me by breaking my config or muscle memory than anything.
Am I the only one who thinks the way plugins are updated in lazy.nvim (and probably others) is a bit insane? It seems to just pull the latest commits. Every time I update, I feel one rogue commit away from someone stealing my keys. It definitely feels like the riskiest thing I do on my system. Or have I misunderstood something?
Thanks, new fear unlocked for me :')
For me, lazy.nvim doesn't pull the latest commits automatically. I have to <leader>-L and SHIFT-U it. And I don't do it often exactly because if there's an issue with the plugins I hope it's caught by others and addressed before I update mine.
you are right to be worried about such practices. this is why i avoid these things entirely. its a bit more hastle but a lot less risk. once you have a good config u can just roll with that anyhow. but i guess in the same vein i dont use a lot of plugins.
the nr of times now people have been owned by rogue plugins via editors is rising each day...
So you mean you review all the plugin code before you add it? And when there's an update you review the changes?
I can’t recall the last time
I updated a plugin. They are all working just fine.
I add new language support from time to time. And sometimes I want to update a plugin because of a fix or new feature support.
I needed to update the lot when upgrading from neovim 0.10 to 0.11.x
I don't really. It's not like I use that many, and they are all sort of "complete". This isn't JS where you need to update and change your libraries every 5 minutes.
The same logic applies to js. vim plugins see updates on a weekly basis, you don't have to upgrade anything if what you have works for you.
Don't know about op, I had a script that would go through each plugin folder, check if it was a git folder, and pulled.
Now I use vimplug though
git submodule updategit pull. too often i found breake so i inspect git-log message prior to update, git-bisect came in handy once
'using git'
what’s the issue? you just git clone the repo into the correct directory
I have been staying on vim-plug where everyone seems to be moving on to lazy.vim. I was considering a weekend to migrate to lazy.vim sometime. But with this news, I might just have to wait for this plugin manager to drop.
Why? I’ve been using dein since it was released and haven’t needed to switch to anything (though I’ve noticed the momentum shifts quickly between different ones).
I think I update Vundle like once every 3 years.
Similar here too. I'm on the lazy.nvim train too because it's componentized, powerful, and scalable. It would take me ages to get all of the stuff going that Just Works™ (pretty much) OOTB. Yes, even Copilot if you're into that sort of kinky code completion sharing with OpenAI/Microsoft everything you type.
I recently moved away from lazy.nvim to using vim.pack. You can check out my PR here:
https://github.com/azemetre/dotfiles/pull/61/files
It was worth it to me because I never relied on many features of lazy.nvim. The benefit of the approach linked in the PR is that it also defer's loading packages as well. The only one I initially load is alpha.nvim (a dashboard), everything else gets deferred. This brought down my startup time from around 300ms to sub 100ms.
Just wanted to say I snatched your autocmd "go to last loc when opening a Buffer"
That's handy!
No problem! One of my favorite things about vim is how modular it is and how simple it is to extend it too.
You're using an editor that is built to be configurable for people who enjoy endless configuration. This will not be the last config manager. You might as well ask JS community if Nextjs is the last JS framework
Yeah, this is like asking if "uv" will be the last package manager for Python.