Actually I remember why I do this now. It's to make Pathogen work. From Pathogen's docs: Note that you need to invoke the pathogen functions before in

Actually I remember why I do this now. It's to make Pathogen work. From Pathogen's docs: Note that you need to invoke the pathogen functions before invoking "filetype plugin indent on" if you want it to load ftdetect files. On Debian (and probably other distros), the system vimrc does this early on, so you actually need to "filetype off" before "filetype plugin indent on" to force reloading. So yeah, it's not voodoo, it's not redundant, it has a purpose that I just couldn't remember off the top of my head. I'm not sure how the calls to Pathogen got moved out from between those line -- probably when I was rearranging my vimrc at some point.