This article was published 5 years ago. Due to the rapidly evolving world of technology, some concepts may no longer be applicable.
Vim 7.4 was released yesterday, and as it’s not in any repos yet and there’s no PPA available, our only option is to install it from source.
First, we make sure that all of our dependencies are available
sudo apt-get install mercurial build-essential ncurses-dev
Then, we clone the latest source
hg clone https://vim.googlecode.com/hg/ vim
And we build it with all of the features we can
cd vim/src
make distclean
./configure --with-features=huge --enable-pythoninterp --enable-rubyinterp
make
sudo make install
It’ll be installed into /usr/local/bin/vim. You can check the version using:
/usr/local/bin/vim --version
Add it to your path with:
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH
Then just type vim to start using it.
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
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