I was doing some work on a virtual machine that's running CentOS 5.7 and wanted to run vim with my existing .vimrc file and plugins.

By default, vim isn't installed. I'd tried to install it from the repos though, so running vi --version told me that I was running VIM - Vi IMproved 7.0 (2006 May 7), which is a bit old for me. I need to be running at least version 7.3 with +python and +ruby support for extensions.

Grab the source code:

$ wget ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/unix/vim-7.3.tar.bz2

Extract from the archive

$ tar xvjf vim-7.3.tar.bz2 && cd vim73

Configure, disabling selinux and enabling ruby support.

$ ./configure --disable-selinux --enable-rubyinterp --with-features=big

Make the binary and install it

$ make && sudo make install

Check your current version:

$ vim --version

You should get something similar to VIM - Vi IMproved 7.3 (2010 Aug 15).

Congrats! You just installed Vim 7.3 on CentOS 5.7