Making Vim portable

Question

I am learning to use Vim and I want to have a portable version on my USB to edit my code here everywhere. I knew there are a portable version of Vim, but while i was searchi

Answer 1

Despite all the portable forks and complicated HOWTOs, making plain vim portable is pretty easy, actually I can't imagine it could get easier as you only need single line in config. At least on Windows, but I expect it to work elsewhere as well, let me know if I am wrong.

tl;dr

let $HOME=$VIM

$VIM variable is relative to the executable and points to parent directory (Z:\vim-portable in our case).

the unnecessarily long version

Let's mix in directory structure and pathogen.

1. Unpack the zips in vim74 dir:

   • vim74w32.zip (cmd version)
   • gvim74.zip (GUI version)
   • vim74rt.zip (runtime files)

2. Create your _vimrc config file and insert:

   " Make vim portable.
   let $HOME=$VIM
   
   " Load and run pathogen.
   runtime bundle/vim-pathogen/autoload/pathogen.vim
   execute pathogen#infect()
   

3. git clone pathogen into vimfiles/bundle dir. You could also just autoload pathogen, but I like it this way.

And the tree looks like this:

Z:\vim-portable
|   _vimrc
|   
+---vim74
|   |   gvim.exe
|   |   vim.exe
|   +---autoload
|   +---colors
|   +---compiler
|   +---doc
|   +---ftplugin
|   +---indent
|   +---keymap
|   +---lang           
|   +---macros
|   +---plugin
|   +---print
|   +---spell 
|   +---syntax
|   +---tools
\---vimfiles
    \---bundle
        \---vim-pathogen