Package(Plugin) Management for Vim

I am now using VimPlug for my own Vim setup, and I definitely recommend it. Installation is very simple, and it is fast, pretty and effective!

I used to recommend Vundle in this answer. But Vundle is no longer maintained, and there are better alternatives.

Plugin management for vim used to be a pain in the traditional way by spreading plugin files across the whole personal vim runtime directory, eg. ~/.vim for *nix system. Once a plugin is installed, it is hard to be updated because there is no easy way to remove the outdated plugin files which is a necessary step.

At the beginning, I'd like to list my personal requirements about how a fine plugin management tool should be:

1. shall be written in pure VimL
2. shall install plugins into their own directory
3. shall autoload plugins when vim starts, nice to load as needed
4. shall have a builtin method of installing, updating and removing plugins
5. nice to have a builtin method of search needed plugins
6. shall be able to declare needed plugins in a file
7. nice to have dependency solving mechanism

There are lots of implementations out there(Vim-Scripts.org has a comprehensive summary of all the available tools), I will only talk about several major tools by their creating order.

vimball was the first attempt to solve the problem and actually had been a half-official solution that lots of plugins shipped with a *.vba package together for a long time. Combined with GetLatestVimScripts, this formed the traditional way for the vim plugin management.

Even though, the problem still remained until Tim Pope's pathogen(Github Repo), which places each plugin into its own directory an