Pathogen is a package manager plugin for Vim. Essentially, it lets you install any other plugin that supports pathogen installation by cloning it’s git repo into a directory.
To install pathogen, clone https://github.com/tpope/vim-pathogen into your ~/.vim/ directory, or clone it in some other location and copy pathogen.vim into ~/.vim/autoload/. To activate it, add
execute pathogen#infect()
into your ~/.vimrc file.
Now, to install new plugins, just clone their repositories into ~/.vim/bundle. The plugins will be loaded automatically.
Here’s a list of some interesting and useful plugins that support pathogen installation to get you started:
NERDTree - file explorer sidebar
NERDCommenter - smart commenting for multiple languages (uses the <leader> keybinding, learn more about it here)
airline - a nice status bar plugin
ctrlp - a fuzzy finder bar like the one seen in Sublime Text (plays well with pathogen, according to this website)
fugitive - git integration plugin