How do I add plugins to Vim — not on Linux or OS X — but on Windows?

August 17, 2018 8:32 AM

I've installed Git, and Curl, and followed every tutorial that I could find, and so far all I have to show for it is a sore butt from three days of googling, "installing Vim plugins on Windows" and similar. Help!
posted by Chasuk to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

If the plugin is simple enough, you can often just copy the .vim file into vimfiles/plugin/ and restart. I understand this isn't really a best practice, but it can get the job done.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 8:39 AM on August 17, 2018

What plugins are you having trouble with?
posted by metadave at 8:56 AM on August 17, 2018

Response by poster: First, I'd like to install vim-plug – hopefully to make the entire process easier. I'd also like Goya and Limelight, UniCycle and maybe vim-textobj-quote, vim-wordy, vim-languagetool and vim-grammarous, and I'd like to look at these:

Plug 'reedes/vim-pencil' " Super-powered writing things
Plug 'tpope/vim-abolish' " Fancy abbreviation replacements
Plug 'reedes/vim-lexical' " Better spellcheck mappings
Plug 'reedes/vim-litecorrect' " Better autocorrections
Plug 'reedes/vim-textobj-sentence' " Treat sentences as text objects

Thank you to everyone who has answered!
posted by Chasuk at 9:08 AM on August 17, 2018

If you are on Windows 10, it will be far easier to just install the Windows Subsystem for Linux, which basically makes a native installation of one of several flavors of Linux terminal in Windows.
posted by rockindata at 12:00 PM on August 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

Best answer: My go-to vim plugin for managing vim plugins is pathogen : https://github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen . I'm assuming that vim-plug does something similar. Using pathogen I was able to install Goya, Limelight, and Unicycle on to work in vim on windows.

In Summary

The process was basically to use curl to install pathogen as described in the pathogen README file and then use git to download the other plugins. I'm not familiar with these plugins so it actually took longer to verify that the plugins were functioning than it did to install them.

In Detail

If you've already installed git, you should have the "git bash shell" which comes with it's own version of vim and curl. You should be able to start that shell from the windows start menu and work within that window. Follow the instructions on the pathogen page to install pathogen using the curl command. The instructions on that page say "If you're using Windows, change all occurrences of ~/.vim to ~\vimfiles." but don't do that. The version of vim that comes with git uses the ".vim" directory - not "vimfiles". Once you've installed pathogen and edited your .vimrc, run vim from within the bash shell. It should open without errors.

Now, inside the "bundle" directory that you created in the previous step ( still working inside the same shell) just git clone the plugins ( in practice you should do this one by one and verify that each one is functioning before going on to the next ).

cd ~/.vim/bundle
git clone https://github.com/junegunn/goyo.vim.git
git clone https://github.com/junegunn/limelight.vim.git
git clone https://github.com/jdiamond/UniCycle.git

Now your plugins should be available when you run vim from the command line.

If you are using the vim that is available as a windows download, just rename the .vim directory to vimfiles.
posted by metadave at 1:22 PM on August 17, 2018 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Metadave, thank you SO much! I got everything to work except for Limelight, which apparently doesn't like the terminal I'm using.

Again, much appreciated!
posted by Chasuk at 11:51 PM on August 17, 2018