VimPlug unknown function plug#begin in NeoVim

Question

Recently I decided to switch from Vundle to VimPlug, and I noticed that after installing it...

• putting the plug.vim in my autoload directory ~/.vim/autoload/

• and making sure that my vim and neovim was symbol linked so I didn't have to create a whole new set of directories just for neovim with this...

   ln -s ~/.vim ~/.config/nvim
   ln -s ~/.vimrc ~/.config/nvim/init.vim
  

I was still getting errors. It works perfectly in vim, but soon as I start up nvim I get these list of errors.

 Error detected while processing /home/username/.config/nvim/init.vim:
 line   26:
 E117: Unknown function: plug#begin
 line   28:
 E492: Not an editor command: Plug 'vim-airline/vim-airline'
 line   29:
 E492: Not an editor command: Plug 'vim-airline/vim-airline-themes'
 line   30:
 E492: Not an editor command: Plug 'scrooloose/nerdtree'
 line   31:
 E492: Not an editor command: Plug 'ctrlpvim/ctrlp.vim'
 line   32:
 E492: Not an editor command: Plug 'flazz/vim-colorschemes'
 line   34:
 E117: Unknown function: plug#end

This is the VimPlug section of my .vimrc

"[VIMPLUG]
call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged')

Plug 'vim-airline/vim-airline'
Plug 'vim-airline/vim-airline-themes'
Plug 'scrooloose/nerdtree'
Plug 'ctrlpvim/ctrlp.vim'
Plug 'flazz/vim-colorschemes'

call plug#end()
"[VIMPLUG_END]

What am I doing wrong ?

Answer 1

For whatever reason it doesn't seem to see VimPlug with the first symbolic link I had in my post. This is the only plugin I couldn't get to work in neovim with it.

So instead of making a symbolic link of ~/.vim to ~/.config/nvim. I decided to make a symbolic link of ~/.vim to ~/.config/ (note that I'm truncating the nvim part).

So in terminal that will be ln -s ~/.vim ~/.config/

You'll see that it'll create a folder symbolic link called .vim rename it nvim

And then run this command ln -s ~/.vimrc ~/.config/nvim/init.vim

This will create a symbolic link of your .vimrc named init.vim inside that symbol link folder.

However, if you go to your vanilla .vim folder in your home directory you'll notice a init.vim there as well. DON'T delete this. Deleting this would result in the one you just created to get deleted, since putting a file in the folder your linking is basically putting it in that folder as well. This is the only way I got it to work without putting plug.vim in the nvim's system wide autoload folder.

Answer 2

Another possibility is that you lack permissions for the folder ~/.vim or ~/.vim/autoload. The problem you are talking about can also occur in this situation.