Manage remote pathogen bundles from multiple source types.
I've been looking for a way to maintain a ~/.vim{,rc} repository. The natural
solution is to just have a Git repo containing my ~/.vimrc and contents of
~/.vim. Sure, that's no problem.
Since I use pathogen, I have a variety of bundles that are repositories of various types: Git, Mercurial, etc. I strongly believe in the philosophy that version control should not be tied into the operation of the thing it is tracking. For that reason, using Git submodules as part of my vim configuration repository just seems stupid. This was not the problem that submodules tries to solve and it leads to a lot of problems and configuration difficulties. My adherence to this philosophy also means that I don't want to use systems like Vundle, though I appreciate the author's work in developing this sort of workflow.
So I decided to build a way to easily manage remote repositories outside of vim, without requiring the use of a specific repository. The result is vim-pandemic.
Clone this repo, and then run:
sudo python setup.py install
This places the pandemic executable onto your path (probably at
/usr/local/bin/pandemic), and installs its dependencies to your
site-packages folder.
By default, pandemic manages bundles in ~/.vim/bundle.remote. So, in your ~/.vimrc,
you're going to want:
execute pathogen#infect('bundle.remote/{}')In addition to having calls to pathogen#infect() for your local bundles.
Using pandemic is easy! Like, really, it actually is easy.
Using the add BUNDLE TYPE SOURCE command, we can easily add new bundles.
BUNDLE can be any name you want to give the bundle you're storing, TYPE is
one of the source types (run pandemic --types to find out supported types),
and SOURCE is the remote source. For example:
$ pandemic add nerdtree git https://github.com/scrooloose/nerdtree.git
will add NERD Tree to our bundle list. It's being developed in a Git repo on Github.
What if we wanted something from Mercurial because the developer is some kind of hipster? Easy:
$ pandemic add l9 hg https://bitbucket.org/ns9tks/vim-l9
pandemic also supports things that aren't version-controlled. For example,
you might have a directory that you simply want to copy over to your bundle
directory. For that, you can just use the local type. Or, you might have a
directory that contains its own update script called .update; for that, you
can use the type script.
Adding new types is as easy as modifying bundle.py to have more
BundleActioners.
Simply:
$ pandemic remove nerdtree
If you stick keep at the end, it will not delete the data from the bundle
directory. I highly don't recommend that.
To update all bundles, just run:
$ pandemic update
Or, to update specific ones:
$ pandemic update nerdtree tagbar
Try:
$ pandemic list | column -t
Let's say you removed some entries from pandemic's database file but left the physical bundle files in the bundle directory. You can use:
$ pandemic list-dead
to find which bundles are still in the directory but not in the database file
and vice-versa. You can then run pandemic update to get missing bundles or
delete extra bundles yourself.
pathogen allows you to append ~ at the end of a bundle name to disable it
from being used at runtime. pandemic does a decent job of detecting this
when you are trying to perform operations. Simply keep using the original name
in your tasks. For example, let's say you installed NERD Tree, but then you
disabled it and now you want to remove it. That's okay!
$ pandemic add nerdtree git https://github.com/scrooloose/nerdtree.git
$ mv ~/.bundle.remote/nerdtree ~/.bundle.remote/nerdtree~
$ pandemic remove nerdtree
pandemic knows what to do. Please, just don't try to simultaneously have
~/.vim/bundle.remote/nerdtree and ~/.vim/bundle.remote/nerdtree~ exist at
the same time. pandemic doesn't detect every form of idiocy.
I'm deciding whether I want to allow the user to enable or disable bundles from pandemic. Part of me thinks that this is a bad idea and is missing the point of the program.
Yeah, probably. But it's suitable for my workflow, which is what I care about. When I was trying to think up names for this program, I accidentally ran across vim-epidemic, which does just about the same thing, only in Ruby, and also only with Git repositories.