Script Roundup: enabler, vim-stay

enabler

enabler (GitHub: tomtom/enabler_vim) by Tom Link is a script for selectively loading bundles. It can be used with a plugin manager like Pathogen, allowing you to avoid slowing down Vim’s loading time.

A specific plugin can be loaded with :Enable, and you can enable a set of plugins that you always use in your .vimrc.

If you use Vim on a slow machine or regularly try out lots of plugins, then this will be useful.

vim-stay

Martin Kopischke’s vim-stay (GitHub: kopischke/vim-stay, License: MIT) plugin adds automated view session creation and restoration whenever editing a buffer. If you find Vim loses state when cycling through buffers with commands like argdo and bufdo, then this might help you take back control of the editor's state.

It maintains a list of “volatile” file types (g:volatile_ftypes) that are never persisted, and there are some recommended viewoptions in the documentation that should help it work with folds and cursor position.

Keeping editing session state should be a given in an editor; unluckily, Vim’s solution for this, view sessions, are not easily automated without encountering painful bumps. As the one plug-in I found that aims to fix this, Zhou Yi Chao’s restore_view.vim, limits itself to Vim sessions, doesn’t play well with other position setting plug-ins like my own vim-fetch and as I found its buffer name based heuristics rather error prone, I wrote my own.