Skip to content

Build Vim from Source

Ammar NajjarAmmar Najjar · Posted on June 23, 2016
vim

Many times when I want to use vim which comes within the main repo of any Linux distro, I find that it is missing some kind of support, either python or client-server mode, or any other feature. And there for I have to build it manually from source and install it.

In this post, I show the steps to do that on fedora, as it is my current distro. I had to collect the steps from many resources including vimdoc, vim-wiki and many stackoverflow answers and blogs. So I wanted to blog these steps to come back to them anytime I need to build vim from source with:

  • Python3 support.
  • Ruby support.
  • Lua support.
  • Perl support.
#!/bin/bash
sudo dnf install ncurses ncurses-devel -y
cd ~
git clone https://github.com/vim/vim.git /tmp/vimsrc
cd /tmp/vimsrc
CFLAGS+="-O -fPIC -Wformat" ./configure --with-features=huge \
        --enable-multibyte                                   \
        --enable-rubyinterp                                  \
        --enable-python3interp                               \
        --with-python3-config-dir=/usr/lib/python3.5/config  \
        --enable-perlinterp                                  \
        --enable-luainterp                                   \
        --enable-gui=auto --enable-cscope --prefix=/usr/local
make VIMRUNTIMEDIR=/usr/local/share/vim/vim74
sudo make install

# Show Result
vim --version

In case python-2.7 is needed instead of python3, just replace them in the config lines:

	--enable-pythoninterp                               \
	--with-python-config-dir=/usr/lib/python2.7/config  \

Go to Top