Plugin installation

Installing plugins is pretty easy. Just place them inside this folder (create it if it doesn't exist yet):

~/.config/vem/pack/plugins/start/

Vem will load all plugins present in this directory at startup.

For example, to install vim-eunuch you can do:

# only required if the start folder doesn't exist
mkdir -p ~/.config/vem/pack/plugins/start

cd ~/.config/vem/pack/plugins/start/
git clone https://github.com/tpope/vim-eunuch.git

Take the following into account when managing your plugins:

  • Plugins are loaded at startup time, that means that you need to restart Vem any time you add or remove plugins for the changes to make effect.

  • If you add plugins to the start directory by directly cloning them from their repositories. That way you can pull changes every time that you want to update one.

  • To delete plugins, it is only necessary to delete their directories and restart Vem.

  • Plugin configuration options in Vem can be set in your vemrc file, instead of vimrc file, which is the one used in Vim.

  • Inside pack/ you can have multiple directories to group plugins. For example, you could have pack/foo/start/ and pack/bar/start simultaneously and the plugins of both directories will be loaded when you start Vem. Using pack/plugin/start/ is just a suggestion.

Help tags

If you want to be able to browse the documentation of the installed plugins using the :help command, you have to instruct Vim/Vem to parse the plugin help files first. To do that, execute:

:Helptags

It can be a good idea to execute this command every time that you add or remove plugins.