Pathogen Makes Plugin Management Easy

I have been using Pathogen for installing new plugins whenever possible for quite a while now. In my opinion, Pathogen is the simplest path to extending your existing Vim runtime with additional functionality.

You can install Pathogen with the following command (assuming you're using a Linux operating system).

mkdir -p ~/.vim/autoload ~/.vim/bundle; \
curl -Sso ~/.vim/autoload/pathogen.vim \
https://raw.github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen/master/autoload/pathogen.vim

Once Pathogen is installed, enable it by adding the following to your .vimrc.

execute pathogen#infect()

Once Pathogen is enabled, you can install a wealth of plugins by simply cloning them to your ~/.vim/bundle directory. As an example, you can install the vim-sensible plugin as follows.

cd ~/.vim/bundle
git clone git://github.com/tpope/vim-sensible.git

Tab Buffer Browsing

Using the following mappings in normal mode provides a convenient way to easily switch between the next and previous buffers.

nmap <tab> :bn<cr>
nmap <s-tab> :bp<cr>

Thanks to Chris for the tip!

Window Manipulation

If you have two horizontally split windows and would like to increase the size of the current window, you can do ctrl-w +. A count can be issued beforehand, so to increase the height by 10 lines 10 ctrl-w +. Ctrl-w - will decrease the current window height. To set the current window to an absolute height do N ctrl-w _ where N is the number of lines desired.

In a vertically split scheme, you can use ctrl-w < and ctrl-w > to adjust the width. To set the current window to an absolute width, do N ctrl-w | where N is the number of lines desired.

If you have two windows split horizontally and would like to shift to a vertical scheme, you can do ctrl-w H or ctrl-w L depending on which direction you want the current window to go. Ctrl-w J and ctrl-w K will take a vertically split scheme to a horizontal orientation.