Spoiled by Vim plugins?
2020-10-24


Hanging out in freenode's #neovim has taught me a couple of things about the way
things work, and how they're supposed to work. \
One of these things is the native packages system which most people, myself
included, are treating (or have been treating) as a plugin manager in the same
vein as vim-plug and many others.

After lurking and reading, and asking around, several people there have told me
that there's some very strange gymnastics going on behind both the package
system and plugin managers like vim-plug. The general consensus seems to be that
while plugin managers have gotten very crafty and practical and bring much to
the table, the package system continues to reinvent the wheel in very
"vim-like" ways.  
The fact that it loads plugins seems to be more of a side effect than a planned
feature, even if people do use it for their plugin needs. Is this one of those
UI vs UX type situations? Is it because, as many people say, vim is still its
creator's pet project only making sense to him?

I'm afraid I really can't comment on either, but after some testing I have
adopted a sort of hybrid solution. I keep very few "bare necessities" in
Neovim's `runtimepath` and load every other plugin using vim-plug.

I figure this will hold me until the time to migrate my config from `init.vim`
to `init.lua` comes. Everything I keep seeing about the 0.5 nightlies leads me
to believe this will be a change for the better. And if it does come out around
the solstice then what better way to celebrate than by redoing the entire
config! :D