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

Michael Heap

Michael is a polyglot software engineer, committed to reducing complexity in systems and making them more predictable. Working with a variety of languages and tools, he shares his technical expertise to audiences all around the world at user groups and conferences. You can follow @mheap on Twitter