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
6.57. Vim-7.0
The Vim package contains a powerful text editor.
Approximate build
time: 0.4 SBU
Required disk
space: 47.4 MB
![[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.
6.57.1. Installation of Vim
First, unpack both vim-7.0.tar.bz2 and (optionally) vim-7.0-lang.tar.gz archives into the same directory. Then, patch Vim with several fixes from upstream developers since the initial release of Vim-7.0:
patch -Np1 -i ../vim-7.0-fixes-7.patch
This version of Vim installs translated man pages and places them into directories that will not be searched by Man-DB. Patch Vim so that it installs its man pages into searchable directories and ultimately allows Man-DB to transcode the page into the desired format at run-time:
patch -Np1 -i ../vim-7.0-mandir-1.patch
There is an issue introduced by one of the upstream patches that creates a problem downloading spellfiles via HTTP. Until this is updated by the developers, the following patch fixes the problem:
patch -Np1 -i ../vim-7.0-spellfile-1.patch
Finally, change the default location of the vimrc configuration file to /etc:
echo '#define SYS_VIMRC_FILE "/etc/vimrc"' >> src/feature.h
Now prepare Vim for compilation:
./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-multibyte
The meaning of the configure options:
- --enable-multibyte
-
This 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
In UTF-8 locales, the vimtutor program tries to convert the tutorials from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8. Since some tutorials are not in ISO-8859-1, the text in them is thus made unreadable. If you unpacked the vim-7.0-lang.tar.gz archive and are going to use a UTF-8 based locale, remove non-ISO-8859-1 tutorials. An English tutorial will be used instead.
rm -f /usr/share/vim/vim70/tutor/tutor.{gr,pl,ru,sk}
rm -f /usr/share/vim/vim70/tutor/tutor.??.*
Many users are used to using vi instead of vim. To allow execution of vim when users habitually enter vi, create a symlink for both the binary and the man page in the provided languages:
ln -sv vim /usr/bin/vi
for L in "" fr it pl ru; do
ln -sv vim.1 /usr/share/man/$L/man1/vi.1
done
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 LFS system, it may be necessary 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 on this process, 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'
![[Note]](../images/note.png)
Note
By default, Vim only installs spell files for the English language. To install spell files for your preferred language, download the *.spl and optionally, the *.sug files for your language and character encoding from ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/runtime/spell/ and and save them to /usr/share/vim/vim70/spell/.
To use these spell files, some configuration in /etc/vimrc is needed, e.g.:
set spelllang=en,ru set spell
For more information, see the appropriate README file located at the the URL above.