Why I switched from Vundle to Plug



At a recent Vim meetup I learned about Plug, from Keith Smiley which is a plugin manager for Vim that improves upon Vundle. Below are the reasons I switched from Vundle to Plug:

Vundle is not being actively maintained by its creator

Gmarik, the creator of Vundle is no longer able to maintain the project. Somebody may pick up the reigns, but the project has been stalled for some time now.

Simpler bootstrapping for initial install.

With Vundle. getting my plugins working on a new machine was always a pain. With Plug, I can use this snippet from Keith’s dotfiles which will automatically install Plug if Vim starts without it:

" Load vim-plug if empty(glob("~/.vim/autoload/plug.vim")) execute '!curl -fLo ~/.vim/autoload/plug.vim https://raw.github.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim' endif

To be fair, you could probably implement a similar thing with Vundle.

“Lazy Load” plugins

Running lots of plugins can drastically slow down Vim’s startup time. Plug gets around this by allowing you to put off the loading of some plugins.

For example, I only need this syntax plugin when I’m editing markdown files:

Plug 'plasticboy/vim-markdown', { 'for': 'markdown' }

And I only need this plugin when I issue the Rename command:

Plug 'AlexJF/rename.vim', { 'on': 'Rename' }

Faster installation of plugins (sometimes)

If your installation of Vim is compiled with Ruby, which most of mine are, Plug will update/install plugins in parallel. If you don’t have Ruby, it falls back to a native Vim approach.