Setting up a nice clean vim install for myself. Tired of my vim feeling bloated and slow, so I’m rolling my own config distro with just what I need.
Step 1: I need the latest version! Snow Leopard ships with 7.2 instead of 7.3, and I just don’t find being outdated to be acceptable. Fortunately macvim to the rescue!
MacVim is a nice OSX GUI wrapper for Vim. Adds that little bit of polish on over the top. Fortunately it also comes complete with it’s own Vim 7.3 install! And its “mvim” terminal command is apparently smart enough to know that it should act like normal terminal vim if called from an alias of that name. So to get the latest macvim set up and linked, all we need to do is: (Assuming you’re using brew, which you should be.)
brew install macvim
ln -s /usr/local/bin/mvim /usr/local/bin/vim
This leaves us with one problem however. The system installed /usr/bin/vim comes first in the default $PATH. In order to get the correct version simply by typing “vim” we need to reorder /etc/paths to put /usr/local/bin ahead of /usr/bin. Once that is done and saved, reload your shell, fire up vim, and you should see version 7.3.
Alright excellent, updated version of Vim ready to roll. Now that wonderful “set relativenumber” line in my .vimrc will no longer throw errors. Time to start setting it up the way I like it.