// the find
Shougo/neocomplcache.vim
Ultimate auto-completion system for Vim.
neocomplcache is a Vim completion plugin that works by caching keywords from your current buffer and other sources. It predates Vim's async capabilities and was the go-to completion plugin for Vim users before neocomplete and ddc.vim came along. It's effectively a museum piece at this point — the author explicitly says development is finished.
The plugin architecture is actually well thought out: sources, filters, and matchers are cleanly separated into individual files, making it easy to understand what each piece does. The include_complete and tags_complete sources are genuinely useful, pulling completions from header files and ctags without much configuration. The vimscript dictionary files for Vim's own completion (commands, functions, options) are thorough and still accurate. It runs on very old Vim without any compiled extensions, so it works anywhere Vim 7.2+ is installed.
This is explicitly abandoned software — the README itself tells you to migrate to ddc.vim. Running without Lua (the fallback path) is noticeably slow because it does synchronous cache builds in Vimscript. Anyone on Neovim should just use nvim-cmp or blink.cmp; this plugin predates Neovim's LSP ecosystem entirely and won't integrate with it. The configuration API uses a sprawling set of global variables with long prefixed names (`g:neocomplcache_*`) — it's the old Vim plugin pattern at its most verbose, and migrating settings to any successor plugin is a manual line-by-line job.