How to use a Vimball

I noticed that plugins of ViM have now started to ship as vimballs. A vimball is a ViM-readable archive format that holds the plugin files and commands to install them. A plugin downloaded as a Vimball typically has a file extension of .vba or .vimball, say Foobar.vba.

To view the plugin files installed by a vimball and their destination directories, open Foobar.vba in ViM and use:

:VimballList

A Vimball can be installed with a single command. Open Foobar.vba in ViM and invoke:

:source %

% is a ViM read-only register that holds the name of the currently open file. :source executes Ex commands from its source, which is %, the vimball file in this case.

To view the currently loaded plugins, use:

:scriptnames

This lists all the loaded .vim plugin files with their complete path. The plugin installed from the vimball should also be listed in this output.

To remove a plugin which was installed from a Vimball use:

:RmVimball Foobar

The ability of ViM to read and execute vimballs is through a plugin called vimball. A default install of ViM should already have this plugin loaded.