In a recent article by Use Vim, “Omnicompletion and JavaScript”, a fork of a Vim plugin called nodejs-complete was mentioned. I quickly gave it a go but the fork, which enables completion of locally installed modules too, made Vim incredibly slow¹. I decided to use the original plugin instead.

The plugin itself works great but the completion data hasn’t been updated for over two years, which means that some API changes aren’t available. Luckily, there’s a simple fix for that.

First we need to navigate into the directory of the plugin and then into after/autoload/, where we’ll change the git index information of the nodejs-doc.vim file:

git update-index --assume-unchanged nodejs-doc.vim

After that we need to run the update-nodejs-doc.js script:

node update-nodejs-doc.js

The first step isn’t strictly necessary since the plugin isn’t actively maintained anymore, but it’s a good idea to do it anyways so the modified file doesn’t interfere in any way. The only thing you need to do from now on is to run the update-nodejs-doc.js script whenever you feel like it.

By the way, if you want to disable the preview window that appears whenever the plugin’s completion is on, add this to your .vimrc:

autocmd FileType javascript set completeopt-=preview