Vim profiles

vim-profiles is a pathogen-inspired-and-based Vim plugin, that has it's goal to reduce your Vim startup time. It gives you an ability to organize your plugins (or so called bundles) into several sets (profiles) to be loaded on demand.

Installation

The easiest way to install vim-profies is to copy autoload/profiles.vim file to the autoload directory under your vim runtime path (usually it will be ~/.vim/autoload).

Then you just have to add the following into your vimrc:

exec profiles#init()

Also you need to install pathogen. Unfortunately, vim-profiles requires to use a forked version from the develop branch of this github repo: mirlord/vim-pathogen.

But to be honest, you'll get nothing amazing until you organize and configure your profiles. On how to do it - see "Usage" section below.

Usage

1. Create some directories under your ~/.vim/profiles/ (if your vim runtime files are located in another directory - you definitely should know how to correctly interpret the defaults I use here). Example:

    $ ls ~/.vim/profiles
    base
    development
    lib
   

2. Move your bundles to the appropriate profile directories (see FAQ section if you have trouble with relocating bundles as git submodules). Let's imagine the following result:

    $ ls ~/.vim/profiles/lib
    genutils
    $ ls ~/.vim/profiles/base
    localvimrc
    airline
    $ ls ~/.vim/profiles/development
    ctrlp
    syntastic
    ultisnips
   

3. For 80% of our vim usage we need only a good colorscheme and a nice statusbar. So we decide to always load lib and base profiles on startup. To acieve this we should define the confguration variable:

    let g:profiles_default = ['lib', 'base']
   

   or you can do the same by setting the environment variable $VIM_PROFILES. It should contain just profiles names separated by space, i.e.:

    alias vim='env VIM_PROFILES="lib base" vim'
   

   Note, that it's a very good idea to include localvimrc to one of your default profiles. It will help you to use vim-profiles most effectively.

4. Sure, vim now starts 100500 times faster without those development plugins. But what if we need them? Just type the following command:

    :LoadProfiles development
   

   or as a shortcut:

    :LP development
   

   and go working hard to start a Rise of Machines.

5. Place .lvimrc file with this command into your ~/projects/ directory and may the Force be with you. That's localvimrc to always load I told you why.

FAQ

Is it something similar around?

The very close idea is implemented by ipi. But it does not exactly the same things vim-profiles does. And I actually never tried to use it. I just know it and if it will be more useful for you - pony will die. But how cares about pony.

Why the plugin xXx fails to be loaded with vim-profiles?

Most probably this plugin uses some autocommands, that are binded to the VimEnter event. If you load a plugin's profile at runtime, this event will never be fired so the plugin won't work. vim-profiles knows about some of those plugins an have a built-in support of them (such as airline, fugitive and some other), but it can't know all of them. Please notify me about such plugins and I will teach vim-profiles to load them properly. It's also configurable from user-space, but not documented. If you are familiar with vimscript - pull-requests are always appreciated.

How to relocate a bundle if it's a git submodule?

Yes, a tricky way of manual removing and re-adding bundles and git submodules is a pain. For that reason there are some shell-scripts distributed with this plugin, that will try to do their best to save your time and nerves. Their names and usage info should be self-explanatory, I hope. Scripts are under bin/ directory.

Any roadmap?

Maybe. I just don't want to violate my promises.

License

The MIT License

Copyright (c) 2013 Vladimir Chizhov [email protected]