// the take
VimShell is a shell emulator built entirely in Vim Script, giving you an interactive shell buffer inside Vim with its own command parser, history, and completion integration (neocomplcache/neocomplete/deoplete). It's for long-time Vim users who want a shell-like workflow without leaving the editor, but the author has explicitly stopped developing it.
The command parser and job-control layer (bg, sexe, vexe, iexe) are a genuinely impressive amount of shell semantics reimplemented in pure Vim Script. Deep integration with the Shougo ecosystem (unite.vim, neocomplete, deoplete) means completion and history search feel native rather than bolted on. It predates Neovim's built-in terminal and :terminal, so it solved a real gap at the time.
The README states active development has stopped and points users to Deol.nvim instead — this is a maintenance-mode repo, not something to adopt new. It depends on a stack of other now-largely-retired Shougo plugins (neocomplcache, neocomplete, unite.vim) that themselves have been superseded by newer tools (deoplete, denite, ddc.vim), so pulling this in means pulling in a chain of legacy dependencies. Being pure Vim Script with synchronous job handling, it can't match the async job control and PTY fidelity of Neovim's native terminal or modern alternatives. No Lua/Neovim API usage at all, so it gets none of the performance or UI benefits Neovim users would expect today.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →