Vim 7

Vim 7 has been released and is the stable version. This page is from when it was not released yet.

Vim 7 includes many new features and improvements, such as:

• Vim script enhancements: Lists, Dictionaries, profiling, etc.
• On-the-fly Spell checking.
• Translated manual pages.
• Internal grep, faster and portable.
• Printing multi-byte text.

What you can obtain is a snapshot. This is a highly instable version. It might not even compile. Only use this when you are a Vim developer.

Obtaining Vim 7 with Aap

This is the simplest method. It will use CVS if possible, download the zip archive otherwise. After installing Aap you can do this:

mkdir vim cd vim aap -f http://www.a-a-p.org/vim7/main.aap CVS=no

This will download the needed files and build Vim in one go.
Note: The "CVS=no" argument is added to use the patches instead of CVS. This generally works better.

After doing this once you can get the latest version with:

cd vim aap update

Options

• If you want to build with different configuration arguments, create a file vim7/src/config.arg and insert the arguments, one per line.
• To install in your home directory use a PREFIX argument, e.g.: aap install PREFIX=/home/bram

Resources:

• Python version 1.5 or later: www.python.org
• Installing Aap: www.a-a-p.org

Obtaining Vim 7 through Subversion

Subversion is a new addition, currently it appears to work better than CVS.

mkdir vim cd vim svn co https://vim.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/vim/vim7 cd vim7/src vim -c make

You can browse the Vim 7 files online at SourceForge.
For generic info about using SVN see the Subversion site.

Obtaining Vim 7 through CVS

If you don't want to use Aap or Subversion you can do the CVS steps manually:

mkdir vim cd vim cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sf.net:/cvsroot/vim checkout vim7 cd vim7/src vim -c make

You can browse the Vim 7 files online at SourceForge.
Note that the CVS server currently only has an older version!
For generic info about using CVS see the CVS page.

Obtaining Vim 7 as a zip archive

These commands illustrate how it's done:

mkdir vim7 cd vim7 fetch ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/unstable/snapshot/vim-7.0001.zip unzip vim-7.0001.zip cd src vim -c make

Obviously, you need to replace "0001" with the version you want to use. If you do not have the "fetch" command use any other way to download the file from the Vim ftp server.

Main disadvantage of using the zip archive is that you need to download and unpack the whole thing for every version. The archive is more than 7 Mbytes. You can tell unzip to overwrite existing files:

cd vim7 fetch ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/unstable/snapshot/vim-7.0002.zip unzip -o vim-7.0002.zip cd src vim -c make