Vopher: A New Plugin Manager

Vopher is a new plugin manager for Vim. It’s written by Mathias Gumz in the Go programming language, and allows you to search, install, and update plugins. It has its own file format for listing plugins, which is basically a list of URLs or comments.

If you’re already using a plugin manager you might wonder what problem Vopher solves. One appealing feature is it doesn’t download the entire Git repository of each plugin. Instead it gets the relevant release, which means it uses less storage space. Also, because it’s written in Go it should be fairly easy to build it on your Linux server or desktop.

To use it you’ll need to install Go if you don’t have it, then run go build to build the vopher binary.

It’s going to be hard for Mathias to win people over to Vopher, and right now it really needs more documentation. Even though it’s new it runs pretty well, so I recommend at least trying it out.