Fixing vim-plug update error on Neovim on Windows

I’ve recently started transitioning to Neovim and configuring it for development. Its native asynchronous support, Lua scripting, Language Server Protocol (LSP), and Debug Adapter Protocol (DAP) provide an IDE-like experience directly in the command line.

My configuration started as an overhaul of the one I use with Vim. I use vim-plug as the plugin manager and everything was working flawlessly until I run :PlugUpdate to update Neovim plugins I had previously downloaded.

The problem

The command worked for some plugins, but went on error for others with the following message:

An unknown element "" was received.
This can happen if the remote process closed or ended abnormally.

Well, there were actually a lot of them.

Understanding why

After a bit of searching and troubleshooting, it turns out that some plugins didn’t like I had set PowerShell as the default shell on Windows in my vim config.

" choose shell
if has('win32')
    set shell=pwsh.exe
endif

You can check if yours is set to PowerShell as well by running:

:set shell?
shell=pwsh.exe

But why does this cause issues? The problem lies in the fact that these plugins rely on running scripts in Command Prompt (cmd.exe). Executing them in PowerShell makes them crash and quit on error. And since they are executed in a non-interactive shell, the shell errors are not visible and that makes the debug a bit tricky.

Solution

If, like me, you’ve programmatically set PowerShell as your default shell in your configuration and don’t want to switch back to Command Prompt, there’s a simple workaround: temporarily unset the shell variable before updating your plugins.

:set shell&

Then check the shell value. It should be reverted to cmd.exe.

:set shell?
shell=cmd.exe

You can now update your plugins.

:PlugUpdate

This setting is temporary and will reset the next time you load your configuration.

I hope it helps. Thanks for reading.