Vim is not a text editor so much as a way of life. Vim, which traces its lineage back to Vi, has accrued plugins during its 36-year history the way offshore rocks accrue barnacles. From file managers and spell checkers to multiple-entry clipboards and undo levels, Vim plugins ingeniously offer from the command line every utility you can imagine on the desktop – and probably some that you can't. Regular users can be known to install more than a dozen at a time, which makes managing them a basic requirement.

The trouble is, Vim was never made to handle the large number of plugins that many modern users install. Without a manager, a plugin either has to be dropped into ~/.vim/plugin, or, in the case of very old plugins, simply ~/.vim. However, its files are unsorted, which means you have to update or delete each plugin manually. In some cases, you also need to run the command :helptags if you want online help.

Plugin managers are designed to spare users these trials. Vim-addons [1] treats plugins as packages, whereas Pathogen [2] – itself a plugin – creates separate directory structures for each plugin under ~/.vim, making updating and deleting much easier. By contrast, Vundle [3] and NeoBundle [4] rely on Pathogen's structure but add automatic updates and other features. Each of these alternatives is considerably easier than adding plugins to unmodified Vim, but which to choose depends on your work habits, as well as your notions of security.

[...]