Useful snippets for documentation?

[knghtbrd]

I used to use vim-plug whose documentation included an if statement you could use to drop a vimrc/init.vim on a new system and the first time you started vim, it'd install all your plugins for you. Useful if you are constantly blowing away the contents of a machine and want to easily deploy a functional environment to it.

Unfortunately minpac doesn't have such a simple single-file you can download, but I came up with this:

" self-install minipac!
if empty(glob('~/.config/nvim/pack/minpac/opt/minpac'))
        let g:minpac_first_install = 1
        silent !git clone https://github.com/k-takata/minpac.git
                                \ ~/.config/nvim/pack/minpac/opt/minpac
endif

" regular minpac setup
packadd minpac
call minpac#init()

call minpac#add('k-takata/minpac', {'type': 'opt'}) " opt is required for minpac

" other plugins here

" actually install plugins
if exists('g:minpac_first_install')
        call minpac#update()
endif

This seems about as convenient as defining commands to call minpac's function. Unless I did it "wrong", in which case I'm sure the Internet will inform me of how I should've done it.

One niggle: My colorscheme is unavailable a few lines later in init.vim because minpac#update() hasn't finished installing it. I've protected it with a try block for now since I can run the single command myself once the job finishes.

[knghtbrd]

Correcting myself, instances of g:minpac_first_install above should probably be changed to s:minpac_first_install.