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Say I load a .txt file into Vim. Then I want to change the filetype=html but I also want an associated ftplugin loaded. How can I do this?

I've tried stuff like: :set filetype plugin on and :set filtype plugin_name on and also :filetype plugin_name on etc etc., but I can't seem to manually load the ftplugin. Any suggestions?

I've tried :filetype=html and then :filetype plugin on and other combinations to no avail.

EDIT: I was not able to "completely" solve this with any of the answers (but it maybe something individual to my configuration). However, Pierre's answers were pretty darn good so I'm giving him the green check mark.

I'm fairly sure that when you switch a file's type using :set ft=X it will automatically load the associated plugin in your .vim/ftplugin folder. E.g. :set ft=html would load .vim/ftplugin/html.vim where you would load any associated plugins. However BufEnter and BufNew plugin loads associated with html files won't be loaded as setting a new filetype does not trigger these events. So if you have html specific plugins in your .vimrc that are loaded with BufNew or BufEnter you may want to put them in a .vim/ftpluging/html.vim file instead.

You could always add a modeline to your text file that changes the filetype. E.g. <!-- vim: ft=html --> .

I'm specifically having trouble with this for the snipMate plugin which has one of its scripts in ~/.vim/ftplugin/ - I get there by using the it's all text firefox plugin which opens the web page as a .txt file. I have to do this because I'm working with a CMS. – Rob Dec 28, 2009 at 20:17 The exact file the does NOT get loaded is: ~/.vim/ftplugin/html_snip_helper.vim (which snipMate uses to close html tags so for example typing an r and hitting TAB creates <br />) – Rob Dec 28, 2009 at 20:23 Scripts in the ftplugin folder MUST have the name of the filetype, e.g. python.vim, ruby.vim, html.vim. These are defined in the filetype.vim. My guess is that html_snip_header.vim gets loaded by the snipMate plugin which is loaded in the plugin directory right? Add a html.vim file under ftplugin that loads html_snip_header.vim directly and it should have the same effect. – Pierre-Antoine LaFayette Dec 29, 2009 at 12:30 You could always add a modeline to your text file that changes the status e.g. <!-- vim: ft=html --> . – Pierre-Antoine LaFayette Dec 29, 2009 at 12:32 Filetype has three settings: detection, plugin loading and indentation. :filetype on will only set the detection, try ":filetype plugin on" or even ":filetype plugin indent on". – c089 Mar 9, 2010 at 14:07

Just had the same situation where ftplugins weren't loading even though I had a Perl file open. Turns out that my copy of Vim (from Git for Windows ) didn't come with ftplugin.vim and ftplugof.vim

Here's how I arrived at that realization:

:filetype

check that filetype plugin is indeed turned on.

:scriptnames

print the list of sourced scripts, found out no script from ftplugin\ is sourced.

I didn't realize it at that time, but I should've noticed that I didn't see ftplugin.vim in there.

check if Vim directory ( {git-path}/share/vim/vim{version}/ ) has the ftplugin.vim and ftplugof.vim

these files are sourced when you execute :filetype plugin on and :filetype plugin off

To fix this, I grabbed the missing files from the Vim runtime files and copied to where it should go.

Sorry, yes I tried this to no avail. I think Pierre has a point in his comments above below his post; I'll try to put an html.vim to source the other ftplugin. – Rob Dec 29, 2009 at 15:02 I've installed snipMate. Here's a sequence of my commands: vi a.txt :f a.cpp :w :e then I enter for and press <tab> and it inserts the for cycle as documented. Maybe you will give it yet another try? When you do :e vim does exactly the same sequence of actions as it would opening the file as "vi <filename>" which involves loading all necessary plugins. – Antony Hatchkins Dec 30, 2009 at 5:39 Well snipMate itself works (sorry for the big misunderstanding), but specifcally for .html files, it calls a little helper script located in ~/.vim/ftplugin...this is the issue I am having. This particular script adds nothing other then it closes any html tags that are by nature single like <br /> for example. – Rob Dec 30, 2009 at 20:46

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