Installing Vim

Installation of Vim

If you don't like vim to be installed as an editor on the LFS system, you may want to download an alternative and install an editor you prefer. There are a few hints how to install different editors available at http://archive.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs-hints/editors/

Both the vim-rt and vim-src packages need to be unpacked to install Vim. Both packages will unpack their files into the vim-5.7 directory. This won't overwrite any files from the other package. So it doesn't matter in which order it is done. Install Vim by running the following commands:

./configure --prefix=/usr &&
make &&
make install &&
cd /usr/bin &&
ln -s vim vi

If you plan on installing the X Window system on your LFS system, you might want to re-compile Vim after you have installed X. Vim comes with a nice GUI version of the editor which requires X and a few other libraries to be installed. For more information read the Vim documentation.

FHS compliance notes

The FHS says that editors like vim should use /var/lib/<editor> for their temporary state files, like temporary save files for example. If you wish vim to conform to the FHS, you should use this command set instead of the one presented above:

./configure --prefix=/usr --localstatedir=/var/lib/vim &&
make &&
make install &&
cd /usr/bin &&
ln -s vim vi &&
mkdir /var/lib/vim

Contents

The Vim package contains the ctags, etags, ex, gview, gvim, rgview, rgvim, rview, rvim, view, vim, vimtutor and xxd programs.

Description