Package manager for plugins/themes?

[corigan01]

I looked around the previous discussions and issues and couldn't find any references to talk about a package manager to go along with the plugin system. I saw some references to possibly removing some themes from the main repo and thought that maybe a centralized package management option (like Rust's) would be the perfect fit.

Something similar to this in your config.toml:

[packages]
# could be centralized like crates.io...
my_package = "1.0.0" 

# or just a link to a git repo with some helix specific scheme or toml config?
other_package = {git = "https://github.com/someone/helix-package"} 

Personally, my experience with other editors supporting plugins/externals is a fragmented ecosystem. I would love to see helix adopt something that would make adding themes/plugins easy and standardized. This could maybe even ease community pressure with backwards compatibility with version tags like edition since you know all packages will have them.

I am sure the direction helix takes is going to be awesome, just wanted to throw this out as an idea if no one has brought it up before. A technical discussion could get me started on a PR if there were genuine interest (I would love to contribute if I could).

[sadamczyk-eos]

1000% agree. Please please provide a common or "standard" way for installing plugins.

The one thing that put me off using Neovim each time I tried was the extremely fragmented ecosystem.
If there are a ten different ways to install plugins, and ten different ways to configure plugins, and ten different ways for managing keybinds and ten different ways for managing themes (etc.etc.) you end up with so many different combinations of things, it just ends up being a really confusing mess.
If possible there should be enough structure required for each plugin (and APIs for the plugins to use) from the get-go, so that this doesn't happen to Helix as well.
This should include things like defining keybindings, help text (for -?), configuration options etc.

It would be preferable if there was some kind of official "registry" for these plugins as well, but I do understand if that is not possible, because that requires resources, hosting and also moderation etc.