Neovim: Install plugins without a plugin manager

2024-07-27 | 4 min read

Yes, and all we have to do is download them in the right path.

How does it work?

Neovim and vim have this feature called packages. A package is a directory that can contain multiple plugins.

The file structure of package can look like this:

some-package
├── colors
│   ├── a-colorscheme.vim
│   └── some-colorscheme.lua
├── doc
│   └── my-help-page.txt
├── lua
│   └── some-module
│       └── some-file.lua
└── plugin
    ├── a-file.vim
    └── some-file.lua

According to Neovim's documentation, a plugin is literally a script located in the plugin directory. They call it a "global plugin". So in our example, plugin/a-file.vim is one plugin and plugin/some-file.lua is another plugin.

Notice something interesting? This is the same file structure all Neovim plugins can have. So what we consider to be one plugin, Neovim's documentation calls it a package.

But where should we add these things?

The pack directory

Every directory in the packpath option can contain a directory called pack. Inside pack we can group our packages.

For example:

pack
└── vendor
    ├── opt
    │   └── package-one
    └── start
        ├── package-two
        └── package-three

vendor is just a random name I chose for this group. You can pick any name you want.

Within our group we can have opt packages and start packages.

Packages in the start directory will be available in the runtimepath during Neovim startup process.

A package in the opt directory will only be added to the runtimepath after we call the command :packadd. This is the way we can lazy load plugins.

The download path

First, inspect the value of the option packpath. Execute this command in Neovim.

:set packpath?

If you find that unreadable, you can try to print each path using lua. Execute this command.

:lua vim.tbl_map(print, vim.opt.packpath:get())

That's the list of directories where you can have a pack directory.

Example time:

By default Neovim's configuration directory is a part of the packpath, so that's a perfectly valid place to create a pack directory.

Let's pretend we are using linux and want to download mini.nvim. We could execute this command the terminal.

git clone https://github.com/echasnovski/mini.nvim \
  ~/.config/nvim/pack/vendor/start/mini.nvim

Note that after we download a plugin we need to generate the help tags using this command inside Neovim.

:helptags ALL

After we create the help tags we can use the :help command to navigate to the documentation of the plugin.

Now that mini.nvim is available in Neovim's runtimepath we can test it. We can try for example the module mini.files in our Neovim configuration.

Let's create a keyboard shortcut to toggle mini.files explorer.

local mini_files = require('mini.files')

mini_files.setup({})

vim.keymap.set('n', '<F2>', function()
  if mini_files.close() then
    return
  end

  mini_files.open()
end)

A little command

If you want, you can have a Neovim command that uses git clone to download plugins from github.

This should work just fine:

vim.api.nvim_create_user_command(
  'GitPlugin',
  function(input)
    local repo = input.fargs
    local url = 'https://github.com/%s/%s.git'
    local plugin_dir = vim.fn.stdpath('config') 
      .. '/pack/vendor/start/%s'

    if repo[1] == nil or repo[2] == nil then
      local msg = 'Must provide user name and repository'
      vim.notify(msg, vim.log.levels.WARN)
      return
    end

    local full_url = url:format(repo[1], repo[2])
    local command = {'git', 'clone', full_url, plugin_dir:format(repo[2])}

    local on_done = function()
      vim.cmd('packloadall! | helptags ALL')
      vim.notify('Done.')
    end

    vim.notify('Cloning repository...')
    vim.fn.jobstart(command, {on_exit = on_done})
  end,
  {nargs = '+'}
)

Going back to our previous example, now we could download mini.nvim using this command inside Neovim:

GitPlugin echasnovski mini.nvim

Conclusion

You are ready to enjoy Neovim plugins available on github without a plugin manager.

I want to clarify, I'm not saying plugin managers are useless. You probably still need one. Neovim doesn't have a mechanism to update plugins, or remove them. The package feature only loads plugins into Neovim's runtime. You still need to manage your plugins somehow.

If you have a question you can reach out to me on social media:

Twitter @VonHeikemen_
Mastodon @vonheikemen@hachyderm.io