Vimporter

Vimporter is a thought experiment.

The goal is to provide functionality to build static-plugins with Vim. To be more precise, goal is for Vim plugins to depend on other plugins, without needing the user to actually install those other plugins as shared libraries.

How it works

A plugin specifies a requirements.vim.txt file, which can be used by Vimporter, itself a Vim plugin.

Installing

With Vundle:

Plugin 'Kashomon/vimporter`

requirements.vim.txt

namespace: example
requirements:
- google/vim-maktaba >= 0.15.0
- zorp >= 0.1.0

Opening requirements.vim.txt in Vim and running :Vimporter import clones the plugins' autoload directories and renames them appropriately.

So, for the example plugin, these libraries would be copied as:

Note: I've used YAML here for the format.

Analysis

• Makes it easier to copy-and-paste plugin code
• Can't really do interesting dependency analysis: would need to copy the whole plugins.