This tip is obsolete: use Mercurial instead; see building Vim and using Mercurial.

Do you want the latest, official syntax highlighting files, runtime scripts, documents, macros, language support, plugins, etc? See

ftp://ftp.home.vim.org/pub/vim/runtime
ftp://ftp.home.vim.org/pub/vim/runtime/colors
ftp://ftp.home.vim.org/pub/vim/runtime/compiler
ftp://ftp.home.vim.org/pub/vim/runtime/doc
ftp://ftp.home.vim.org/pub/vim/runtime/lang
ftp://ftp.home.vim.org/pub/vim/runtime/macros
ftp://ftp.home.vim.org/pub/vim/runtime/syntax
ftp://ftp.home.vim.org/pub/vim/runtime/tools

Patches and whatnot are distributed on vim-dev, but typically don't contain the updates to files in the directories above. If you're having a problem with syntax highlighting, for instance, check the syntax repository above just in case its been fixed already.

In my own case, I put experimental versions of syntax highlighting files and plugins that I maintain here, such as netrw.vim (netrw v46a now supports remote directory listing for example).

CommentsEdit

If you have rsync installed, you can use it to synchronize your runtime files. I use it to keep my "master" runtimes up-to-date, currently at ~/.build/vim/vim72/runtime/, as follows (the "parent" vim72 directory being the current directory):

rsync -avzcP --delete --exclude="/dos/" ftp.nluug.nl::Vim/runtime/ ./runtime/

On Linux, I follow that by a make installruntime step if anything other than tags has been updated.

Note: Even on Windows, where I expect rsync to be available at least via Cygwin and/or MinGW and/or GnuWin32, I recommend downloading the "Unix" runtimes; even Vim for Windows can source them with no problem. It's true that Notepad cannot display them correctly, but Wordpad can. — Tonymec 05:45, 6 May 2009 (UTC)