(Re)compiling vim from source

Vim sources are hosted at Google code  here.

The sources are maintained in a Mercurial repository. So if you want to (re)compile vim from source then you should first make sure a Mercurial client is installed on your machine.

Then type these commands into your shell. Make sure to include the --enable-pythoninterp flag if you want to compile vim with +python attribute set.

$ hg clone https://vim.googlecode.com/hg/ vim

$ cd vim/src

$ ./configure --enable-pythoninterp --with-features=huge --prefix=$HOME/opt/vim

$ make && make install

$ mkdir -p $HOME/bin

$ cd $HOME/bin

$ ln -s $HOME/opt/vim/bin/vim

Then type ...

  which vim

... and sure that the shell finds your freshly compiled $HOME/bin/vim.

If the shell finds a different version of vim then you may need to add something like ...

  export PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH

... to your .profile.

Finally, type ...

  vim --version

... and check that the +python attribute is set.

These instructions are taken verbatim from Martin Brochhaus's presentation on using vim as an IDE. Martin's presentation is available on his github page at https://github.com/mbrochh/vim-as-a-python-ide.

(The whole presentation is recommended. As it Martin's .vimrc file.)