A (very) minimal bash script to [g]et packages for Vim 8+, as a companion to the "packages" feature (see :help packages in Vim).

• Clone and update Vim plugins from remote git repos
• Display changelogs after updating
• Build tags for help files
• Parallel execution
• About 50 lines of pure bash, requiring git and coreutils components mktemp, xargs, grep

• Removing unmanaged packages
• Cloning from non-master branches

Create a file (e.g. plugins.txt) specifying plugins to clone and where to put them, consisting of two columns separated with whitespace. Use start for regular packages and opt for packages to lazy load using packadd:

$ cat ~/.vim/plugins.txt
start https://github.com/tpope/vim-commentary
start https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive
start https://github.com/romainl/vim-cool
opt   https://github.com/mbbill/undotree
start https://[email protected]/caksoylar/caksoylar/_git/caksoylar
# comment lines are ignored

If it doesn't exist, create a directory to place remote plugins in Vim path:

$ mkdir -p ~/.vim/pack/remote

Call vjp with plugins file and packages folder as arguments:

$ vjp ~/.vim/plugins.txt ~/.vim/pack/remote 8

Last argument is optional and specifies the number of workers if you would like to run in parallel.