How to manually load an ftplugin after startup in Vim?

Question

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.

Answer 1

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 -->.

Answer 2

:filetype on
:set filetype=html

Answer 3

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:

1. :filetype

   • check that filetype plugin is indeed turned on.
     
     

2. :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.
     
     

3. 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.

Answer 4

Vim automatically loads the correct plugin when you change the filetype

:set ft=python

You can start up vim in verbose mode:

vim -V

This will show you what vim is executing. If you open a file and manually set the filetype, vim will show if it's loading the correct plugin.

Answer 5

:f something.html
:w
:e