I’ve spent years customizing my vim configuration. My original configuration came from my friend Mat Brown, and from there I started making changes. A while back, I started sharing my dotfiles on GitHub for ZSH, vim, tmux and irssi.

One underlying annoyance was that every time I added a new vim extension, my vim directory would get even more wooly, even more out of control. I’d just be dumping files into these directories, and hoping everything kept working — luckily, it always did :)

Recently, I’m really into vundle, and every file in my vim configuration (except for ~/.vimrc) has since gone away. Vundle handles all of it.

Vundle is essentially a package manager for vim, which allows you to pull in vim files from git locations. It keeps installation easy, and updates painless. You just specify things like:

Bundle 'ZoomWin' # https://github.com/vim-scripts/ZoomWin
Bundle 'vim-ruby/vim-ruby' # https://github.com/vim-ruby/vim-ruby
Bundle 'https://github.com/some/full-location'

and then you can :BundleInstall to get going. Definitely check it out if this is (& has been) a problem for you:

vundle on github