Today I switched my vim plugin manager to Vundle.
I used to use pathogen.

Vim Configuration

Actually I only started using Vim after my internship.
At that time Justin directly let me clone a copy of his vim configuration.
Using a ready-made configuration greatly flattened Vim’s learning curve,
and I could get started using it pretty quickly.
Even now, I still think the correct posture for picking up Vim is to find some big shot’s configuration.

Later when I’d been using Vim a bit more,
I started trying to manually modify vimrc to change settings.
The foundation of modifying code is reading code / learning code,
so I learned about pathogen,
a Vim plugin for quickly adding plugins…

pathogen

The advantage of pathogen is that it’s tiny and straightforward:

You just need to add an autoload folder,
configure pathogen’s loading,
and then you can freely add or remove plugins under the preset plugin directory.

However, there are a few annoying things in actual use:

  • For convenience, I generally use git submodule to add plugins.
    git submodule not only has a crappy usage,
    its commit is also pinned,
    so I often have to manually update plugin versions.
  • Because I used git submodule, deleting plugins also became cumbersome.
  • pathogen is mainly written by Tim Pope,
    and that project only has three updates in a year…
    not active at all.

Considering flexibility/portability/activity,
I decided to switch package managers.

Vundle

So I thought of Vundle,
a Vim plugin manager that looks pretty proper.
Its configuration is actually relatively simple:

Clone the Vundle package locally (can use git submodule),
configure vimrc, then write plugin names in vimrc.

But the first time loading plugins with the command vim +PluginInstall +qall can be pretty slow.

Current Configuration

So after fiddling around a bit,
I successfully switched from pathogen to vundle.
My dotvim is on github.

Side note:
The first time I learned about Vundle,
I always felt it had a strong knockoff-Emacs-package-manager vibe,
so back then I didn’t consider Vundle at all…
So technical taste can’t be the only criterion for evaluating technology~