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I would like to have a nice and easy way of managing vim plugins. I found NeoBundle and Vundle. What are the main differences between them? I know that NeoBundle is a fork of Vundle, but what is it that makes it different?

What do you use?

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    Neither of them. I use pathogen and until now quite happy with it :) Commented Jan 23, 2013 at 14:02
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    Not sure why this has two downvotes. It's a reasonable question. The non-answer-but-best-solution is still pathogen, though. :) Commented Jan 24, 2013 at 1:16
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    really? i read everywhere that vundle and neo are better, because they handle updating without submodules. what is your way of updating? Commented Jan 24, 2013 at 2:16
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    Vundle/NeoBundle for the win! Vundle is essentially a big improvement on pathogen. Commented Jan 24, 2013 at 16:26

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Here is an article written (in Japanese) by the author of NeoBundle Shougo, about why he wrote NeoBundle and how NeoBundle differs from Vundle.

Actually, NeoBundle is a fork of Vundle. Shougo added some features to a fork of Vundle but lately found he couldn't follow the upstream Vundle's development, so he made the fork to a new plugin now called NeoBundle.

The differences summarized as below:

  1. Rename the commands from Vundle, replace Bundle to NeoBundle. (Example: BundelInstall to NeoBundleInstall).
  2. Add support for vital.vim, a vim utility library written by thinca.
  3. Neobundle works even you have set the shellslash option other than the default.
  4. Add support for vimproc, a launcher plugin written by Shougo.
  5. Add an interface for unite.vim written by Shougo, he also notes it as the major motive for writing NeoBundle.
  6. Add support for plugins that hosted as a Subversion/Mercurial repository, but it is still an experimental feature now.
  7. (UPDATED) Now NeoBundle adds a lazy loading feature where Vundle doesn't have. It allows you to load plugins at some user-defined time point, not only during the vim initialization where .vimrc is loaded.

I use vundle because it suffices my needs (I used pathogen before). But you can take a try at NeoBundle.

(UPDATE) NeoBundle has stopped active development now and will be replaced by dein.vim, which is Shougo's another brand new plugin manager. As a side note, you can also take a look at vim-plug which I'm currently using.

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2 Comments

I think you should mention that the article explaining NeoBundle author's motivations is written in Japanese.
Its seems dein by the same author is now the better plugin manager so even I switched to it recently.

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