Vim is suppoed to be an easily extensible piece of software. It has a well-defined system for installing these extensions and a central repository in which extensions can be found.

It's really becoming quite annoying that whenever I find a new plugin that I would like to try out, I am berated by that plugin's project page for not having pathogen installed. My .vim directory is the result of years of my fine-tuning one of my most valuable tools as a professional. I don't want to throw out all that and hand over control to some third party script.

I suppose it began with those "vimballs" really. I never liked those either. I just don't get what was so complex about copying a plugin into ~/.vim. Are there *that many* Vim users who are sufficiently non-technical that they were finding this step prohibitively difficult? In my opinion the recent spate of Ruby-related hipsterishness that's enshrouded Vim brought with it a wave of new users who don't actually "get it" at all.

Case in point: At a recent user-group meeting for an unrelated piece of software, I witnessed an attendee who was a much more experienced programmer than I, and a very vocal proponent of Vim, pull out a laptop to show off a project. Some typing was required, so out came Vim, and what did I see but this self-proclaimed Vim-aficionado navigating around his file using none other than the fucking arrow keys. While presumably quietly congratulating himself in his own head for showing the rest of us what a hardcore old-skool geek really looks like.

Screenshots, you fool!

If getting compromised and issuing bad certificates *didn't* cost you your position of trust, then what credibility would the certification process have anyway?

NO U