Clean plugin management in Vim with dein.vim

Photo by Taras Shypka on Unsplash

Vim is the powerful editor works in the various shells. One of the strongest points is the rich plugins. If you search with “vim plugin”, you can see a lot of exciting plugins like,

• nerdtree: file tree previewer

My Vim environment

• vim-airline

My Vim environment

• ale: asynchronous lint tool
• vim-quickrun
• …

To manage these fantastic plugins, almost all users use some plugin managers. In this article I’ll introduce you dein.vim.

dein.vim

Shougo/dein.vim

dein.vim is one of the most famous plugin management tool for vim. This repository has more than 2800 stars!

How to install

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Shougo/dein.vim/master/bin/installer.sh > installer.sh
# For example, we just use `~/.cache/dein` as installation directory
sh ./installer.sh ~/.cache/dein

After installing dein.vim, you should add following code to your .vimrc

As above .vimrc says, you can write what plugin you want to use in ~/.vim/rc/dein.toml in Linux or OS X.

Edit your dein.toml file

With using toml file, we can gather all setting about each repository together! See the following example.

Each setting is separated by [[plugins]] block, so we can know what is a code for at a glance. And more than anything, we can keep .vimrc clean. It is awesome!