vim + pathogen + git submodules

As part of PyCon Au this weekend I did a lot of hacking on my laptop, which is not something I’ve done for a while, given how much I used to hack on my laptop. I was frequently getting annoyed at how my vim config wasn’t the same as it’s currently on my work desktop.

Back in uni, I used to keep my dotfiles in revision control on a machine I could connect to. All I needed was my ssh agent and I could get all my config.

Recently, when wanting to extend my vim config, people’s pages tell me to do it through vim pathogen, which I didn’t have set up.

Also there have been times when people have asked for my vim setup, which I wasn’t easily able to provide.

Given all of that, I decided it was time to rebuild my config using pathogen + git submodules from the ground up. As part of this, I updated quite a few plugins, and started using a few new things I hadn’t had available without pathogen, so it’s still a bit of a work in progress, but it’s here.

Installing new plugins is easy with git submodule add PATH bundle/MODULE_NAME.

If you’re a vim user, I strongly recommend this approach.

Author: Danielle

Danielle is an Australian software engineer, computer scientist and feminist. She doesn't really work on GNOME any more (sadly). Opinions and writing are solely her own and so not represent her employer, the GNOME Foundation, or anyone else but herself.

3 thoughts on “vim + pathogen + git submodules”

  1. General consensus nowadays is to use Vundle instead of Pathogen. Some of the reasons are: No submodules but a specification in your .vimrc (e.g. Bundle ‘tpope/vim-fugitive’), disabling a plugin requires only outcommenting the Bundle line and a user friendly command line interface (e.g. BundleInstall, BundleUpdate …). So, as a vim user, I strongly recommend _this_ approach ;-).

  2. Hi Danielle,
    Thank you! for your post.
    I have recently installed vim on my laptop,
    and the information you provided along with the comments 🙂
    would surely be very useful.
    Regards,
    Shobha

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Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Australia
This work by Danielle Madeley is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Australia.