Building Vim

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created 2002 · complexity basic · version 7.0

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One day, we would like this tip to contain a how-to with advice on building Vim. Meanwhile, feel free to add to the superficial advice following. We will rename the tip when it contains something worthwhile.

Overview

The following applies to Unix-based systems, and Windows.

Download the source from ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/unix/

• vim-7.2.tar.bz2 (7.1MB)

Download the extras from ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/extra/

• vim-7.2-extra.tar.gz (0.8MB)
• vim-7.2-lang.tar.gz (1.4MB)

Expand each in the same directory, for example somewhere/vim/build/72/

Download the patches from ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/patches/7.2/

Apply the patches.

Configure.

Build (compile and link).

Install.

Building GUI Vim on Ubuntu

You need the required development packages on Ubuntu to build the GUI:

sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev libgnome2-dev \
  libgtk2.0-dev libatk1.0-dev libbonoboui2-dev \
  libcairo2-dev libx11-dev libxpm-dev libxt-dev

Commands to build and install GUI Vim:

$ cd vim7
$ make distclean
$ ./configure --with-features=huge --enable-gui=gnome2
$ make
$ sudo make install

Miscellaneous

In Vim, the command :version includes "Compiled by user@host" (the user and computer host names are provided by the operating system).

The configuration option --with-compiledby can be used to set the exact "Compiled by" text (for example, to include an email address).

Comments

See also:

• Build Vim in Windows with Cygwin
• Getting the Vim source with Mercurial
• the following HowTo pages about building Vim from source:
  • on Windows
  • on Unix/Linux

--Tonymec 11:51, June 18, 2010 (UTC)