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Best Vim Plugins in 2026, Ranked by Who Still Ships

Quick answer: The Vim plugins worth building a config on in 2026 are vim-fugitive, fzf.vim, ALE, coc.nvim, vim-gitgutter, vim-airline, UltiSnips and undotree. Every one had a commit in the last eight months. Of the 500 most-used Vim plugins, 79% have had no commit in a year, and several that most guides still recommend, including syntastic and the original ctrlp.vim, stopped years ago.

The pages that rank for this query recommend plugins by reputation. One of them, updated in June 2026, still presents Vundle and pathogen as the managers to pick; another is a 2020 article with a new date on it. Neither states when any plugin last shipped a change, so we checked.

How we checked 500 plugins

On 22 October 2026 we took the 500 plugins with the most users on vimawesome.com, which counts the public GitHub dotfiles that load each plugin, and read every repository through the GitHub API: stars, archive status, and the date of the last commit on the default branch. After removing 9 duplicates, 10 repositories that no longer exist and 15 entries with no GitHub repository, 466 unique repositories resolved.

  • 368 of them (79.0%) have had no commit in 12 months. 36 are formally archived.
  • 324 (69.5%) have had no commit in two years, and 207 (44.4%) in five.
  • 23 (4.9%) had a commit in the last 30 days. The maintained core of the Vim ecosystem is small and mostly made of plugins that also run on Neovim.
  • Among the 50 most-used plugins, 30 have gone a year without a commit; among the top 100, 67 have.

A quiet repository is not always a dead one. Vim's editing model changes slowly, and a 300-line plugin from 2019 usually still works in Vim 9.2. But for the plugins that drive completion, linting and language servers, the ones that break when a language or a server changes, the last-commit date is the first thing to check.

The best Vim plugins in 2026, ranked

Ranked by how much they do for a typical config, limited to plugins with a commit in the last 12 months. Stars and last-commit dates are from the GitHub API on 22 October 2026.

  1. vim-fugitive (21,813 stars, commit 2026-03-07). Git from inside Vim: :Git blame, staging in a status buffer, diffs against any revision. It is the most-used Vim plugin by a wide margin, counted in 47,185 public configs on vimawesome. Verdict: install it first.
  2. fzf.vim (10,267, 2026-09-30). Fuzzy finding for files, buffers, grep results, git commits and help tags, backed by fzf itself (83,719 stars, commit 2026-10-21). Verdict: the replacement for every abandoned file finder on the list below.
  3. ALE (14,024, 2026-10-20). Asynchronous linting and fixing, with a built-in language-server client that works in both Vim and Neovim. Verdict: the lightest way to get diagnostics; it replaced syntastic for good reason.
  4. coc.nvim (25,150, 2026-10-20). Language-server completion, hover, rename and code actions with an extension system modelled on VS Code. It needs Node.js. Verdict: the choice when you want IDE features in Vim; vim-lsp (3,421, 2026-10-15) is the lighter, pure-Vimscript alternative.
  5. vim-gitgutter (8,515, 2026-07-21). Changed lines in the sign column, hunk staging and undo, hunk text objects. vim-signify (2,725, 2026-10-06) does the same for other version-control systems. Verdict: essential next to fugitive.
  6. vim-airline (17,968, 2026-10-14). The status line most configs ship, with its themes repository still maintained (2025-09-22). lightline.vim (6,870, 2026-10-05) is the smaller alternative. Verdict: pick either; both still ship.
  7. UltiSnips (7,696, 2026-09-06). Snippet expansion with Python-backed interpolation, paired with the vim-snippets collection (4,883, 2025-10-28). Verdict: still the standard snippet engine for Vim.
  8. undotree (4,556, 2026-03-08). Vim's undo history as a navigable tree, with diffs between states. Verdict: the one plugin in this list that has no VS Code equivalent.
  9. vim-tmux-navigator (6,314, 2026-01-25). One set of keys to move between Vim splits and tmux panes. Verdict: if you run Vim inside tmux, this is the setup fix with the best effort-to-benefit ratio.
  10. copilot.vim (11,697, 2026-01-09). GitHub's official Copilot client for Vim: inline suggestions, nothing else. Verdict: the AI option that stays out of the way.
  11. vim-test (3,163, 2026-10-06). Run the test nearest the cursor, the current file or the whole suite in any of several runners, with vim-dispatch or a terminal as the strategy. Verdict: small, stable, and still shipping.
  12. vim-sneak (3,537, 2025-12-05). Two-character motions that jump anywhere on screen. Verdict: the maintained successor to vim-easymotion.

Three of Tim Pope's editing plugins sit just outside this list because their repositories have gone quiet, not because they stopped working: vim-surround (14,105 stars, last commit 2022-10-25), vim-commentary (6,166, 2024-10-22) and vim-repeat (2,716, 2024-07-08). All three are finished rather than abandoned, and most configs should keep them.

Which popular Vim plugins have stopped?

These still appear in current guides and starter configs, and all of them still install:

| Plugin | Stars | Last commit | Use instead | |---|---|---|---| | syntastic | 11,206 | 2022-07-10 (archived) | ALE | | ctrlp.vim (kien) | 7,226 | 2015-11-30 | fzf.vim, or the ctrlpvim fork (2026-07-25) | | vim-colors-solarized | 6,586 | 2011-05-09 | gruvbox (2026-09-18) or everforest (2026-06-08) | | vim-multiple-cursors | 7,945 | 2020-07-30 | vim-visual-multi (2024-09-01) | | vim-easymotion | 7,741 | 2022-04-04 | vim-sneak | | auto-pairs | 4,193 | 2019-02-27 | delimitMate (2024-08-06) | | ack.vim | 3,075 | 2018-02-27 | :Rg in fzf.vim | | indentLine | 4,112 | 2023-07-14 (archived) | vim-indent-guides (2023-03-18), or listchars |

The original ctrlp.vim is the instructive case: vimawesome still counts 15,516 configs loading kien's repository, which stopped in 2015, while the maintained fork lives under a different owner. Copying a plugin line from an old guide gets you the dead one.

Do you still need a plugin manager?

Not strictly. Vim has loaded plugins from ~/.vim/pack/ on its own since Vim 8.0, released on 12 September 2016; the mechanism is documented under packages in the Vim help. Clone a repository into pack/plugins/start/ and it loads at startup.

vim-plug (35,777 stars, commit 2026-10-15) is still the manager most guides assume, and it is still maintained, with lazy loading and parallel updates that the built-in mechanism lacks. The two managers older guides recommend are not: Vundle (23,910, 2024-07-30) has gone two years without a commit, and pathogen (12,112, 2022-08-24) four. Both still work, but neither is where a new config should start.

Vim or Neovim: which should you build on?

Vim is still moving. Vim 9.2 was tagged on 14 February 2026 (release notes), the repository had a commit on 21 October 2026, and Vim9 script, the faster compiled scripting language, has shipped since Vim 9.0 in June 2022. The answer to "is Vim still maintained" is yes.

The plugin ecosystem is a different question. Nine of the twelve plugins ranked above work in Neovim unchanged, and the most active development, including tree-sitter highlighting and the Lua plugin generation, happens there; our Neovim plugins ranking runs this same check on 1,411 Neovim repositories. If you are deciding between the two, or between either and an IDE, our code editor ranking covers the trade-offs.

The editor category of our directory lists 44 editors and IDEs as of 22 October 2026, including Vim itself; for learning the editor rather than extending it, the directory also lists Open Vim, an interactive tutorial, and Vim Adventures, which teaches the motions as a game. Vim runs in a terminal, and the terminal category lists the emulators and multiplexers it runs inside.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best plugin for Vim?

vim-fugitive, on both usage and maintenance: it is loaded by more public configs than any other Vim plugin and had a commit in March 2026. If you only install two, add fzf.vim for file and text search.

Is Vim still used today?

Yes. The Vim repository had a commit on 21 October 2026 and version 9.2 shipped in February 2026. Plugin maintenance tells the fuller story: the plugins that still ship are mostly the ones that also run on Neovim, which is where most new plugin work happens.

Is NERDTree still maintained?

Its last commit was on 26 September 2025, so it missed our 12-month bar by a few weeks, and it still works. Vim's built-in netrw is enough for many people, and fern.vim (1,357 stars, commit 2026-10-05) is the actively developed tree.

Do Neovim plugins work in Vim?

Plugins written in Vimscript usually run in both. Anything written in Lua, which is most of the newer Neovim ecosystem, does not run in Vim. Of the plugins ranked above, coc.nvim, ALE, fzf.vim, fugitive, gitgutter, airline, UltiSnips and undotree run in both editors.

What is the best plugin manager for Vim?

vim-plug if you want lazy loading and parallel updates; the built-in package directories if you want nothing extra to install. Vundle and pathogen still work but have not had a commit in two and four years respectively, so a new config should not start on them.