8.74.1. Installation of Vim
First, change the default location of the vimrc
configuration file to /etc:
echo '#define SYS_VIMRC_FILE "/etc/vimrc"' >> src/feature.h
Prepare Vim for compilation:
./configure --prefix=/usr
Compile the package:
make
To prepare the tests, ensure that user
tester can write
to the source tree and exclude one file containing tests requiring
curl or wget:
chown -R tester .
sed '/test_plugin_glvs/d' -i src/testdir/Make_all.mak
Now run the tests as user tester:
su tester -c "TERM=xterm-256color LANG=en_US.UTF-8 make -j1 test" \
&> vim-test.log
The test suite outputs a lot of binary data to the screen. This can
cause issues with the settings of the current terminal (especially while
we are overriding the TERM variable to satisfy some
assumptions of the test suite). The problem can be
avoided by redirecting the output to a log file as shown above. A
successful test will show FAILED: 0 in the
log file at completion.
Two tests, Test_client_server_stopinsert() and Test_popup_setbuf(), are
known to fail on some systems.
Install the package:
make install
Many users reflexively type 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 /usr/share/man/{,*/}man1/vim.1; do
ln -sv vim.1 $(dirname $L)/vi.1
doneBy default, Vim's documentation is installed in /usr/share/vim. The following symlink
allows the documentation to be accessed via /usr/share/doc/vim-9.2.0481, making
it consistent with the location of documentation for other packages:
ln -sv ../vim/vim92/doc /usr/share/doc/vim-9.2.0481
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 https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/postlfs/vim.html.
8.74.2. Configuring 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
" Ensure defaults are set before customizing settings, not after
source $VIMRUNTIME/defaults.vim
let skip_defaults_vim=1
set nocompatible
set backspace=2
set mouse=
syntax on
if (&term == "xterm") || (&term == "putty")
set background=dark
endif
" End /etc/vimrc
EOF
The set nocompatible setting 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
setting allows backspacing over line breaks, autoindents, and the start of
an insert. The syntax on parameter enables vim's syntax
highlighting. The set mouse= setting enables
proper pasting of text with the mouse when working in chroot or over a
remote connection. Finally, the if statement with the
set background=dark setting 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-checking files for the English language.
To install spell-checking files for your preferred language, copy the
.spl and optionally, the
.sug files for your language
and character encoding from
runtime/spell into
/usr/share/vim/vim92/spell/.
To use these spell-checking files, some configuration in
/etc/vimrc is needed, e.g.:
set spelllang=en,ru
set spell
For more information, see
runtime/spell/README.txt.
![[Tip]](../images/tip.png)