Question: How disable a plugin without removing it?

[cjnucette]

You can do this in vim-plug by commenting the corresponding line, but with packer the plugin is always loaded because is in the rtp, which is not the case with vim-plug. I want to be able to disable some plugins to create a minimal init.vim without the need to run :PackerClean.

[akinsho]

@cjnucette you can prevent plugins from loading by making them opt=true this will move them out of the start directory where all plugins are loaded automatically. The difference between packer and vim-plug here is that packer uses vim's native packages feature which you can read more about under :help packages whilst plug doesn't. Packages do come with a few gotchas such as this for example though.

Alternatively, if this is something you might want to do a lot you can create a pattern for it, e.g.

-- outside of packer startup probably
local function minimal()
  return vim.env.MINIMAL == nil
end

packer.startup(function(use)
  use {"a/plugin", cond = minimal}
end)

When you start vim and want a minimal init you can run

MINIMAL=true nvim

[akinsho]

FWIW there's some discussion around making all plugin opt by default and packer loading them itself, which will make things like creating a minimal init.vim easier to do (see #50)

[cjnucette]

Thanks, I'll try this.

[akinsho]

I should also mention that after adding opt=true you need to run PackerSync

[wbthomason]

See #307 and #402 (discussion) as well.