Installed
programs: efm_filter.pl,
efm_perl.pl, ex (link to vim), less.sh, mve.awk, pltags.pl,
ref, rview (link to vim), rvim (link to vim), shtags.pl,
tcltags, vi (link to vim), view (link to vim), vim, vim132,
vim2html.pl, vimdiff (link to vim), vimm, vimspell.sh,
vimtutor, and xxd
10.53. Vim-7.0
The Vim package contains a powerful text editor.
![[Tip]](../images/tip.png)
Alternatives to Vim
If you prefer another editor—such as Emacs, Joe, or Nano—please refer to http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/postlfs/editors.html for suggested installation instructions.
10.53.1. Installation of Vim
First, unpack both vim-7.0.tar.bz2 and (optionally) vim-7.0-lang.tar.gz archives into the same directory.
The following patch contains updates from the maintainer. The maintainer of Vim only releases these patches to fix serious issues.
patch -Np1 -i ../vim-7.0-fixes-5.patch
Change the default location of the vimrc configuration file to /etc:
echo '#define SYS_VIMRC_FILE "/etc/vimrc"' >> src/feature.h
Prepare Vim for compilation:
./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-multibyte
The meaning of the configure options:
- --enable-multibyte
-
This optional but highly recommended switch enables support for editing files in multibyte character encodings. This is needed if using a locale with a multibyte character set. This switch is also helpful to be able to edit text files initially created in Linux distributions like Fedora Core that use UTF-8 as a default character set.
Compile the package:
make
To test the results, issue: make test. However, this test suite outputs a lot of binary data to the screen, which can cause issues with the settings of the current terminal. This can be resolved by redirecting the output to a log file.
Install the package:
make install
Many users are accustomed to using vi instead of vim. Some programs, such as vigr and vipw, also use vi. Create a symlink to permit execution of vim when users habitually enter vi and allow programs that use vi to work:
ln -sv vim /usr/bin/vi
By default, Vim's documentation is installed in /usr/share/vim. The following symlink allows the documentation to be accessed via /usr/share/doc/vim-7.0, making it consistent with the location of documentation for other packages:
ln -sv ../vim/vim70/doc /usr/share/doc/vim-7.0
If an X Window System is going to be installed on the CLFS system, you may want to recompile Vim after installing X. Vim comes with a GUI version of the editor that requires X and some additional libraries to be installed. For more information, refer to the Vim documentation and the Vim installation page in the BLFS book at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/postlfs/editors.html#postlfs-editors-vim.
By default, vim runs in vi-incompatible mode. This may be new to users who have used other editors in the past. The “nocompatible” setting is included below to highlight the fact that a new behavior is being used. It also reminds those who would change to “compatible” mode that it should be the first setting in the configuration file. This is necessary because it changes other settings, and overrides must come after this setting. Create a default vim configuration file by running the following:
cat > /etc/vimrc << "EOF" " Begin /etc/vimrc set nocompatible set backspace=2 syntax on if (&term == "iterm") || (&term == "putty") set background=dark endif " End /etc/vimrc EOF
The set nocompatible makes vim behave in a more useful way (the default) than the vi-compatible manner. Remove the “no” to keep the old vi behavior. The set backspace=2 allows backspacing over line breaks, autoindents, and the start of insert. The syntax on enables vim's syntax highlighting. Finally, the if statement with the set background=dark corrects vim's guess about the background color of some terminal emulators. This gives the highlighting a better color scheme for use on the black background of these programs.
Documentation for other available options can be obtained by running the following command:
vim -c ':options'