Which vim to install?

Vim is lightweight package and its installation is really simple. In this chapter, we will discuss following items −

Vim doesn’t have any specific requirements. It is simple software bundle which provides all dependencies.

Vim stores its configuration in simple text file namely _vimrc and it is located under home directory of user.

Installation on Linux platform is quite simple as compared to Windows. This section describes installation and configuration on Debian based Linux.

Vim stores its configuration in simple text file namely .vimrc and it is located under home directory of user.

This section describes installation and configuration on RPM based Linux.

Vim stores its configuration in simple text file namely .vimrc and it is located under home directory of user.

Vim is a powerful text editor, which comes preinstalled in most Linux distributions. Ubuntu comes with Vim, vi, nano, Gedit (GUI), and many other text editors installed.

In this tutorial, we learn how to install VIM Text Editor on Ubuntu using apt.

Vim is by default installed on Ubuntu. Vim is available in the Ubuntu repository. Ubuntu 20.04 comes with Vim 8.1 version.

To install the latest VIM package available in the repository follow the following steps.

Step 1. Update the Ubuntu package database

Step 2. Install Vim using apt

Step 3. Check Vim version

Now you can open, edit and save a file using VIM. To add extra featured, you can go ahead with installing Plugins for VIM.

Apt repository not necessarily contains the latest version, it takes some time to have the latest version there. If you are a fan of VIM and need the latest features of VIM, you can compile VIM from the source file.

As of writing this tutorial the latest available version available on the VIM website is 8.2

Let's check how to compile VIM using the source file.

First, install all the necessary prerequisite tools:

Second, following the set to commands to download the source file and compile VIM:

VIM is installed to the directory /usr/local/bin/vim. To install to a specific directory use ./configure --prefix=/path/to/install/vim.

Verify the Vim installation by typing vim -v or which vim.

Now we have the latest Vim 8.2 version.

The distribution provided Vim can be installed using apt remove vim, but it's not mandatory.

• To download Vim visit vim.org.
• Click on Download option from left pane.
• Click on PC - MS-DOS and MS-Windows option.
• Download .exe installer from this page.
• Double click on installer and follow on screen instructions to complete installation.

Below is a brief summary of each (links go to package description and dependencies in Ubuntu LTS release 20.04 "Focal"):

Vim compiled and set up with a rather standard set of features. This package does not provide a GUI version of Vim or scripting language support. See the other vim-* packages if you need more (or less).

In order to install this package, run sudo apt-get install vim

This package allows the entering of Kanji from the console.

In order to install this package, run sudo apt-get install jvim-canna

Depends upon the libcanna1g library

Does not appear to support Perl, Python, Ruby, or TCL scripting.

Locally, to see which features are supported in a particular installed vim package, running the following command: vim --version will provide a list of features included(or excluded) in the particular package.

For example, on my system I can run either vim --version, vim.tiny --version, or vim.athena --version to see the differences in their respective supported features. The Debian/Ubuntu /etc/alternatives system determines which vim package executes when you runvi or vim, see What is etc/alternatives used for?