Building Vim from Source

Sun, 08 Sep 2013 14:45:38 +0000

Most Linux distributions ship a stripped-down Vim — often without +python3, +clipboard, or GUI support, and rarely the newest release. Building Vim yourself fixes all of that: you decide exactly which language interpreters and features get compiled in, and you get whatever version is on Vim’s master branch.

The process is straightforward. This guide walks through it on a Debian-based distro such as Ubuntu.

Note: This post has been updated from its original 2013 version to match how Vim is built today. The source has moved from vim.org’s Mercurial repository to GitHub, the Python 2 interpreter has been swapped for Python 3 and the GTK2 GUI for GTK3, and configure flags that newer Vim removed (such as --enable-sniff and the now-default --enable-multibyte) have been dropped.

Vim on Infinite Script

Building Vim from Source