INSTALL - Installation of Vim on different machines. This file contains instructions for compiling Vim. If you already have an executable version of Vim, you don't need this. Contents: 1. Generic 2. Unix 3. OS/2 (with EMX 0.9b) 4. Atari MiNT See INSTALLami.txt for Amiga See INSTALLmac.txt for Macintosh See INSTALLpc.txt for PC (Windows XP/Vista/7/8/10) See INSTALLvms.txt for VMS See INSTALLx.txt for cross-compiling on Unix See ../READMEdir/README_390.txt for z/OS and OS/390 Unix See ../runtime/doc/os_haiku.txt for Haiku 1. Generic ========== If you compile Vim without specifying anything, you will get the default behaviour as is documented, which should be fine for most people. For features that you can't enable/disable in another way, you can edit the file "feature.h" to match your preferences. 2. Unix ======= Summary: 1. make run configure, compile and link 2. make install installation in /usr/local This will include the GUI and X11 libraries, if you have them. If you want a version of Vim that is small and starts up quickly, see the Makefile for how to disable the GUI and X11. If you don't have GUI libraries and/or X11, these features will be disabled automatically. To build Vim on Ubuntu from scratch on a clean system using git: Install tools required to be able to get and build Vim: % sudo apt install git % sudo apt install make % sudo apt install clang % sudo apt install libtool-bin Build Vim with default features: % git clone https://github.com/vim/vim.git % cd vim/src % make Run tests to check there are no problems: % make test Install Vim in /usr/local: % sudo make install Add X windows clipboard support (also needed for GUI): % sudo apt install libxt-dev % make reconfig Add GUI support: % sudo apt install libgtk-3-dev % make reconfig Add Python 3 support: % sudo apt install libpython3-dev Uncomment this line in Makefile: "CONF_OPT_PYTHON3 = --enable-python3interp" % make reconfig Debugging: % sudo apt install valgrind Uncomment this line in Makefile: CFLAGS = -g -Wall -Wextra -Wshadow -Wmissing-prototypes -Wunreachable-code -Wno-deprecated-declarations -U_FORTIFY_SOURCE -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=1 % make reconfig % make test_{test-name} See output in testdir/valgrind.test_{test-name} See the start of Makefile for more detailed instructions about how to compile Vim. If you need extra compiler and/or linker arguments, set $CFLAGS and/or $LIBS before starting configure. Example: env CFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include LIBS=-lm make This is only needed for things that configure doesn't offer a specific argument for or figures out by itself. First try running configure without extra arguments. GNU Autoconf and a few other tools have been used to make Vim work on many different Unix systems. The advantage of this is that Vim should compile on most systems without any adjustments. The disadvantage is that when adjustments are required, it takes some time to understand what is happening. If configure finds all library files and then complains when linking that some of them can't be found, your linker doesn't return an error code for missing libraries. Vim should be linked fine anyway, mostly you can just ignore these errors. If you run configure by hand (not using the Makefile), remember that any changes in the Makefile have no influence on configure. This may be what you want, but maybe not! The advantage of running configure separately, is that you can write a script to build Vim, without changing the Makefile or feature.h. Example (using sh): CFLAGS=-DCOMPILER_FLAG ./configure --enable-gui=motif One thing to watch out for: If the configure script itself changes, running "make" will execute it again, but without your arguments. Do "make clean" and run configure again. If you are compiling Vim for several machines, for each machine: a. make shadow b. mv shadow machine_name c. cd machine_name d. make; make install [Don't use a path for machine_name, just a directory name, otherwise the links that "make shadow" creates won't work.] Unix: COMPILING WITH/WITHOUT GUI NOTE: This is incomplete, look in Makefile for more info. These configure arguments can be used to select which GUI to use: --enable-gui=gtk or: gtk2, motif, athena or auto --disable-gtk-check --disable-motif-check --disable-athena-check This configure argument can be used to disable the GUI, even when the necessary files are found: --disable-gui --enable-gui defaults to "auto", so it will automatically look for a GUI (in the order of GTK, Motif, then Athena). If one is found, then it is used and does not proceed to check any of the remaining ones. Otherwise, it moves on to the next one. --enable-{gtk,gtk2,kde,motif,athena}-check all default to "yes", such that if --enable-gui is "auto" (which it is by default), GTK, Motif, and Athena will be checked for. If you want to *exclude* a certain check, then you use --disable-{gtk,gtk2,kde,motif,athena}-check. For example, if --enable-gui is set to "auto", but you don't want it look for Motif, you then also specify --disable-motif-check. This results in only checking for GTK and Athena. Lastly, if you know which one you want to use, then you can just do --enable-gui={gtk,gtk2,kde,motif,athena}. So if you wanted to only use Motif, then you'd specify --enable-gui=motif. Once you specify what you want, the --enable-{gtk,gtk2,kde,motif,athena}-check options are ignored. On Linux you usually need GUI "-devel" packages. You may already have GTK libraries installed, but that doesn't mean you can compile Vim with GTK, you also need the header files. For compiling with the GTK+ GUI, you need a recent version of glib and gtk+. Configure checks for at least version 1.1.16. An older version is not selected automatically. If you want to use it anyway, run configure with "--disable-gtktest". GTK requires an ANSI C compiler. If you fail to compile Vim with GTK+ (it is the preferred choice), try selecting another one in the Makefile. If you are sure you have GTK installed, but for some reason configure says you do not, you may have left-over header files and/or library files from an older (and incompatible) version of GTK. if this is the case, please check auto/config.log for any error messages that may give you a hint as to what's happening. There used to be a KDE version of Vim, using Qt libraries, but since it didn't work very well and there was no maintainer it was dropped. Unix: COMPILING ON LINUX On Linux, when using -g to compile (which is default for gcc), the executable will probably be statically linked. If you don't want this, remove the -g option from CFLAGS. Unix: PUTTING vimrc IN /etc Some Linux distributions prefer to put the global vimrc file in /etc, and the Vim runtime files in /usr. This can be done with: ./configure --prefix=/usr make VIMRCLOC=/etc VIMRUNTIMEDIR=/usr/share/vim MAKE="make -e" Unix: COMPILING ON NeXT Add the "-posix" argument to the compiler by using one of these commands: setenv CC 'cc -posix' (csh) export CC='cc -posix' (sh) And run configure with "--disable-motif-check". Unix: LOCAL HEADERS AND LIBRARIES NOT IN /usr/local Sometimes it is necessary to search different path than /usr/local for locally installed headers (/usr/local/include) and libraries (/usr/local/lib). To search /stranger/include and /stranger/lib for locally installed headers and libraries, use: ./configure --with-local-dir=/stranger And to not search for locally installed headers and libraries at all, use: ./configure --without-local-dir 3. OS/2 ======= OS/2 support was removed in patch 7.4.1008 4. Atari MiNT ============= Atari MiNT support was removed in patch 8.2.1215.