Using Vim-Plug with portable version of gvim (windows)

Question

My university does not (quite understandably) provide administrative rights to users on their public machines (which run only MS Windows 7 OS). As a regular vim user, I use a lot of plugins (particularly latex plugins), and my vimrc uses Vim-Plug for managing plugins.

I have got around the problem of using vim partially by using the portable version of gvim from here: https://portableapps.com/apps/development/gvim_portable

I am able to clone and use my personal vimrc from github, and the machines have git installed. I was able to get my generic vim-customisations applied, so it's confirmed that gvim-portable indeed recognises my vimrc. However, vim-plug is not working, and throws up a ton of error messages. (I have manually downloaded vim_plug file and dropped it into drive_letter\gVimPortable\Data\settings\vimfiles\autoload folder)

Is there a way to get around this issue?

Answer 1

Two solutions:

1. On a current windows 10 machine that I have access to for work with a user account only, I was able to sucessfully install the standard vim version, named 'self-installing executeable' that is available here: https://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/vim/pc/gvim82.exe

Administrator access was not required.

This version comes with an autoload folder (unlike the portable version). Just download https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim into this autoload folder.

You can also create the autoload folder yourself, if needed.

2. You can always download https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim to C:/SOME/PATH/plug.vim and then in your _vimrc do

source C:/SOME/PATH/plug.vim

to load vim-plug manually.