Trying out dein.vim -- a dark powered plugin manager

Dark Powered Plugin

Original Japanese post here

Vim already has a lot of plugin managers.
But our Dark Vim Master has released neobundle’s successor, a brand-new plugin manger called dein.vim.

Dein.vim is a dark powered Vim/NeoVim plugin manager.

To put it in plain English, dein.vim is a plugin manager focusing on both installation performance and startup performance.
It looks like a neobunle with vim-plug’s speed, or a vim-plug with neobunle’s feature. The best of both worlds.

In this blog post I will first show minimal configuration for dein.vim, and then try to explain the dark power of dein, if you are interested in what makes dein.vim so fast.

Minimal Configuration

Though dark powered, dein.vim supports vim and neovim.

Sadly, there is no installation script for dein.vim for now.
So let’s manually install it.

First, clone dein.vim’s source.

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mkdir -p ~/.vim/dein/repos/github.com/Shougo/dein.vim #recommended path
git clone https://github.com/Shougo/dein.vim.git \
    ~/.vim/dein/repos/github.com/Shougo/dein.vim

If you are familiar with neobundle/vundle, you will find dein.vim’s path so different. It is because dein uses a new approach to manage plugin’s source.

Optionally, you can backup your vimrc for profiling, as I will show later.

Then, in your init.vim or .vimrc.

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set nocompatible
set runtimepath+=~/.vim/dein/repos/github.com/Shougo/dein.vim " path to dein.vim

call dein#begin(expand('~/.vim/dein')) " plugins' root path
call dein#add('Shougo/dein.vim')
call dein#add('Shougo/vimproc.vim', {
    \ 'build': {
    \     'windows': 'tools\\update-dll-mingw',
    \     'cygwin': 'make -f make_cygwin.mak',
    \     'mac': 'make -f make_mac.mak',
    \     'linux': 'make',
    \     'unix': 'gmake',
    \    },
    \ })

call dein#add('Shougo/unite.vim')

" and a lot more plugins.....

call dein#end()

Fire up your neovim/vim, call dein.vim’s installation function

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:call dein#install()

Wait and brew yourself a cup of (instant) coffee.
Then you can confirm your installation, for example call :Unite dein

More features

The most important feature of dein.vim is lazy load. Here are some typical usages worth mentioning.

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" lazy load on filetype
call dein#add('justmao945/vim-clang',
      \{'on_ft': ['c', 'cpp']})

" lazy load on command executed
call dein#add('scrooloose/nerdtree',
      \{'on_cmd': 'NERDTreeToggle'})

" lazy load on insert mode
call dein#add('Shougo/deoplete.nvim',
      \{'on_i': 1})

" lazy load on function call
call dein#add('othree/eregex.vim',
      \{'on_func': 'eregex#toggle'})

The last two lazy loading conditions are not available in Vimplug. While lazy loading according to mode change is very convenient.

Two Tales of Plugin Manager

From here on I will talk about dein’s internal feature. It’s my personal observation, please pardon my mistake and misunderstanding.

Vim’s plugin managers have to take two aspects into consideration: installation time and startup time.
You can read junegunn‘s blogs article, this and this, for more details on plugin manager.

dein.vim is fast because it uses dark power

JKJK. Actually, dein.vim optimizes both two performance, by following measures:

  1. parallel installation dein.vim uses either vimproc or neovim’s async job to download plugins concurrently.

  2. precomputed runtimepath dein.vim will copy all plugins’ subdirectory into a cache directory. This merges all runtime VimScript files into one directory. So dein doesn’t need to compute runtimepath on startup.

Dein.vim also ditches command usage in favor of function calling, which may also contribute to performance(I’m not sure, though).

Troubleshooting

Because dein.vim uses parallel processing, when errors occur in installation it may be hard to figure out which plugin went wrong. Usually you can see the error messages by :message after all plugin finished fetching (regardless of success or not). Or you can use dein#check_install function.

Also, precomputed cache makes modifying plugin harder. You will need to call dein#recache_runtimepath() after modification. This also applies to disabling plugins.

Lastly, if you happen to live in a country with stupid censorship which prevents github access. You will need a proxy and set g:dein$install_process_timeout to a larger value.

For more info please refer to doc.

Profiling dein’s power

Profiling vim’s startup time has a rather standard method. You can try it by backup old vimrc and compare it to dein.

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nvim -u old-init.vim --startuptime neobundle.log # or change nvim to vim
nvim -u new-init.vim --startuptime dein.log

From the log, I can see dein.vim gives me 20ms startup boost! Mainly from boosting sourcing vimrc. Amazing!

If you use a lot of plugins, dein is definitely a must-try!

Tags:
dark
sans