My editor of choice is vim. I am using a MacOS desktop with a fairly recent version of vim, but I am often working on Ubuntu servers. Even in the newest LTS the vim plugins available in the standard package repos may be ancient.

I found a convenient way to auto load plugins installed directly from git repositories: pathogen.vim

You just need to:

https://gist.github.com/1301176

… then edit your .vimrc to initialize pathogen:

https://gist.github.com/2204136

… and install a plugin to test if everything works:

https://gist.github.com/2204145