NeoBundle is a legacy plugin manager by Shougo designed to make installing, updating, and organizing Vim plugins straightforward and scriptable. It lets you declare plugins in your vimrc and handles fetching them from Git repositories, local paths, or archives, then loads them into your runtimepath automatically. One of its core ideas is lazy loading: you can defer plugin initialization until a command, mapping, filetype, or event is triggered, which helps keep startup fast even with many plugins. NeoBundle also understands plugin dependencies and post-update hooks, allowing complex setups to be reproduced reliably across machines. It supports version pinning and branch selection so teams can stabilize on known-good revisions. Although Shougo later introduced dein.vim as the modern successor, NeoBundle remains a usable, declarative way to manage plugins on classic Vim setups.
Features
- Declarative plugin lists in your vimrc with automatic installation and updates
- Lazy loading triggered by commands, filetypes, mappings, or events
- Dependency management and post-update build hooks
- Fetch from Git remotes, local directories, or tar/zip archives
- Version pinning, branch/tag selection, and mirror support
- Commands for health checking, cleaning, and synchronizing plugin states