INSTALLmac.txt - Installation of Vim on Apple MacOS This file contains instructions for compiling Vim. If you already have an executable version of Vim, you don't need this. MacOS Classic is no longer supported. If you really want it use Vim 6.4. Only '/' is supported as path separator. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prerequisites ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Make sure you've installed Xcode and CommandLineTools. You can download Xcode from the Mac App Store, for free. To check for CommandLineTools open a terminal and do: $ make --version If not installed yet a window pops up instructing you to install the developer tools. If you don't have the source yet, best is to use git (which you need to install first), see http://www.vim.org/git.php Or you can download and unpack the Unix tar archive, see http://www.vim.org/download.php ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Build and install the terminal version. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- You can compile vim with the standard Unix routine: cd vim/src make make test sudo make install If you get an error "glibtool: command not found" search on stackoverflow for mac-osx-where-can-i-download-glibtool. With Homebrew, run: brew install libtool To build libtool from source: 1. Download the source code from https://www.gnu.org/software/libtool/. 2. Run these commands from the root of the source code directory: ./configure --program-prefix=g make sudo make install ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Build and install the GUI version with X-Windows ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- First, install XQuartz, which you can download from https://www.xquartz.org. To tell configure to use a GUI you can edit the Makefile and uncomment these two lines (remove the # at the start of the line): CONF_OPT_GUI = --enable-gui=athena CONF_OPT_DARWIN = --disable-darwin Do "make distclean" to start with a clean slate. Then build as with the terminal version above. Instead of "athena" you can try "gtk2" but you probably need to install GTK first. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Notes ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mac-specific configure options are explained in the Makefile: --disable-darwin --with-mac-arch