I use snipMate as addon to my favourite editor, vim. The Vim-addon-manager and the Vim-scipts package give you an easy way to administrate your plugins. For some reason, I could not find any valueable information about integrating additional vim scripts into vim-addons. That is why I am writing this little howto…

The vim-registry manages all the vim scripts, the vim-addons-manager knows. If your script is not listed in the registry, the vim-addons-manager just does not know this plugin. So, all you have to do is to add a new entry. You can do this by creating a new file in /usr/share/vim-registry/, the default registry directory:

vim /usr/share/vim-registry/vim-snipmate.yaml

The file should contain something like this:

1 addon: snipMate
2 description: "the snipMate addon for my vim installation"
3 basedir: path/to/snipmate/
4 files:
5 - after/plugin/snipMate.vim
6 - autoload/snipMate.vim
7 - doc/snipMate.txt
8 - ftplugin/html_snip_helper.vim
9 - plugin/snipMate.vim
10 - snippets/_.snippets
11 - snippets/autoit.snippets
12 - snippets/c.snippets
13 - snippets/cpp.snippets
14 - snippets/html.snippets
15 - snippets/java.snippets
16 - snippets/javascript.snippets
17 - snippets/mako.snippets
18 - snippets/objc.snippets
19 - snippets/perl.snippets
20 - snippets/php.snippets
21 - snippets/python.snippets
22 - snippets/ruby.snippets
23 - snippets/sh.snippets
24 - snippets/snippet.snippets
25 - snippets/tcl.snippets
26 - snippets/tex.snippets
27 - snippets/vim.snippets
28 - snippets/zsh.snippets
29 - syntax/snippet.vim
30 ---

Under files you have to insert all the files of your snipMate version. Line 3 with the tag basedir contains the information for the path to your snipMate, i.e. /usr/share/vim-snipmate/. You should verify that your snipMate files are located there.

Now snipMate should be listed in
vim-addons | grep snipMate
and you can add or remove it from your vim
vim-addons install snipMate
vim-addons remove snipMate