Installing plugins

Here I want to show you how to install a plugin without a plugin manager.

Vim and Neovim have a feature called packages, and this is enough to install many plugins that are hosted on github.

Be aware

Notice the title says install. That's the only thing a Vim package can do. Is just a way to load a plugin into Neovim. Right now there isn't a mechanism to update or delete a plugin.

If you are the kind of person that plans to download 30 plugins and try to keep them up to date, the approach I'm going to show is not going to be good enough for you.

The pack directory

There is an option called packpath. This is a list of directories where we can add a pack directory.

Inside the pack directory we can have a group of packages. And the packages can be "optional packages" or "start packages."

Let's try to setup an example:

Usually our Neovim config directory is already included in the packpath list. This can be a valid path to create a group of packages.

Say we want to create a group called vendor. We should create a directory in one of these paths:

~/.config/nvim/pack/vendor/         (Unix and OSX)
~/AppData/Local/nvim/pack/vendor/   (Windows)

Is worth mention the name of the group can be anything. vendor is just a name I like.

Inside vendor we can have two types of packages: opt and start.

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

Packages in opt are considered optional. Neovim will not use them until we execute the command :packadd.

Packages in start will be loaded automatically during the startup process of Neovim.

Inside opt or start is where we actually put the plugins we want to use.

Git clone a plugin

The only thing we need to install a plugin is git and knowing a valid path inside the packpath.

Let's say we are on a Linux system and we want to download mini.nvim.

We can execute this command on a terminal.

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

Is worth mention mini.nvim only supports Neovim v0.9 or greater. If you need to use it in Neovim v0.7, change to the commit dd71253c.

cd ~/.config/nvim/pack/vendor/start/mini.nvim
git switch --detach dd71253c8ab1569f7664034579345f3ae10efa81

After we download a plugin we should generate the help tags, so the :help command can find the documentation of the plugin.

nvim --headless -c 'helptags ALL' -c 'quit'

And that's it. Now we can use mini.nvim in our personal config.

Showing how to use mini.nvim is a story for another day. But we can check the plugin is available by trying to read the help page of one its modules. We can try for example reading the help page of mini.pick.

:help mini.pick