Vim-Pathogen is a lightweight plugin manager for Vim that simplifies how you handle and isolate your runtime path. Rather than dumping all plugins directly into the same directories, Pathogen encourages you to install each plugin into its own subdirectory (for example under ~/.vim/bundle/), and then it automatically adds those directories into Vim’s runtimepath. This makes upgrades, removals and organization of plugins far easier and more robust. It also supports “infecting” arbitrary directory patterns, so you can keep your plugin directories wherever you like and still have them load seamlessly. While Vim 8 and newer include native “packages” support, Pathogen remains valued for its simplicity and for backward compatibility with older Vim versions. The README emphasises minimal fuss: once execute pathogen#infect() is in your vimrc, you can clone plugin repositories and they just work. Overall, Pathogen gives you a clean, maintainable plugin-directory structure.
Features
- Manage each plugin in its own directory for clear separation
- Automatically prepend plugin directories into runtimepath
- Support custom glob or absolute paths for plugin directories
- Back-port “package” style loading on older Vim versions
- Provide a :Helptags command to generate documentation for all plugins
- Minimal configuration and overhead