Vim plugins are a way of extending the funcionality of Vim.

You do not need a plugin manager to install a Vim plugin.

In this video, we download a Vim plugin and install it without a plugin manager.

To install the plugin, we download it, place it in a .vim directory and make sure our vimrc file can find it.

We first visit vimawesome.com to see plugins available for Vim.

Then we look at a plugin to show when it was created, when it was last updated, and the 4 main vim plugin managers, Vundle NeoBundle, VimPlug, and Pathogen.

We install the VimPlug plugin manager by visiting the github page and downloaded in, then moving it to the autoload directory and unzipping it. We then need to move the plug.vim file from the sub-directory to the autoload directory, then we need to update the .vimrc file.

We add lines in the .vimrc file to make the VimPlug plugin manager work, then we add our plugin line (copied from the vimAwesome page and pasted between the plug begin and plug end code in our .vimrc file.

Some plugins require extra lines of code in the .vimrc file to get some functionality to work properly.

The Vim Airline Plugin is a colorful status line for Vim.

We use the VimPlug plugin manager installed in Vim (41).

We get the lines we need to type in from vimawesome.com and we install the vim-airline plugin by typing PlugInstall.

The vim-airline plugin is installed, but we don't see any colors.

To see the colors we add a line to our .vimrc file:
.set t_Co=256

To get the arrows to show, we need to turn on the powerline fonts with:
let g:airline_powerline_fonts = 1

To get install the proper fonts we go to the vim-airline git-hub page and click the link to the font tha twe download and install.

Doing all that completes the installation of the vim-airline plugin.