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Question

I am not new to Vim but I am new to using plugins to upgrade the Vim experience. I recently installed vim-plug; the goal being what is usually the goal of anyone installing vim-plug: to automate the process of installing, upgrading and using Vim plugins.

I am facing an issue when I add the line

:PlugUpdate

in my .vimrc file. Indeed, when this is the case whenever I try to open a file through Vim I get a page like this:

[Plugins]  .vimrc                                                             X
  1 Updated. Elapsed time: 1.007506 sec.                                        
  2 [==]
  3 
  4 - Finishing ... Done!
  5 - vimtex: Already up to date.
  6 - NERDTree: Already up to date.

This is an expected behavior and I do not worry about it. My issue is however when I try to move on from this page to access the document I was trying to open. Trying the usual

:q

Does not work: it seems to open an empty document. My question is then: what am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

I can't reproduce your exact issue. Although when I put :PlugUpdate into a random spot in my vimrc, I get different problems like buffer-local variables not being defined.

Without offering much of an explanation or root cause, the fix is simply not to put :PlugUpdate into your vimrc.

Vim-plug's usage instructions only mention the following commands:

call plug#begin()
Plug 'author/plugin'
call plug#end()

Note the absence of :PlugUpdate. It's fair to assume that the commands above are the only ones to be added to vimrc.

Anyhow, running :PlugUpdate slows opening Vim down. One of the main reasons I personally use Vim is because it's fast (even when burdened with some plugins). I wouldn't want to sacrifice any of its speed to pointless checks for updates.

Also, most Vim plugins are reasonably stable and don't need to be updated every hour or so. Doing :PlugUpdate manually every few months or so works well for me (but then I don't have any cutting edge plugins installed).

By the way, for any plugin that uses tags, I only update to the latest tag. In my day-to-day work, I really don't want to put up with broken experimental features. It's as easy as appending the following dictionary:

Plug 'author/plugin', {'tag', '*'}

If you want to have regular updates, I'd schedule running something like vim +PlugUpdate +qa.