Official Vim patches

For released versions patches are made available. These fix small or big problems. Only source code patches are provided.

The patches for released versions of Vim are here.
An overview of what each patch solves is in a README file. For Vim 7.3 it is this README file.

To apply a patch, you must get the sources, go to the directory where the "src" directory is located and apply the patch with:
patch -p0 < patchfile >& logfile
To apply multiple patches you can concatenate them and pass the resulting file to the patch program. It's a good idea to redirect the output to be able to check for error messages.

Using Aap

An alternative way to build Vim with the latest patches is by using Aap. This is still experimental, but many people have reported it works well.

Aap will fetch the original distribution and then apply all the available patches. You can repeat this later and only the new patches are downloaded and applied. You do not need to type URLs, everything is taken care of automatically. It does require installing Aap.

The detailed explanation can be found here. Please report problems to Bram AT a-a-p.org.

Other Vim patches

A list of unofficial patches available for Vim can be found on the vim_dev maillist pages.

These are mostly patches to add new features. Some are mature and should work fine. Some only work on a specific system, e.g., Unix. Some are work in progress. Read the vim_dev maillist to find out more.