This tip will be a quick one, and I want to thank one of the commentors on a previous post for pointing this out to me. The vim that comes installed on your base machine is not the full vim, for some reason. I guess its the basic “this’ll get the job done”-vim, but not the “this has all the cool features”-vim.
To install the full vim use your favorite package manager or install the package using this command:
sudo aptitude install vim-full
From the package description:
Vim is an almost compatible version of the UNIX editor Vi.Many new features have been added: multi level undo, syntax highlighting, command line history, on-line help, filename completion, block operations, folding, Unicode support, etc.
This package contains a version of vim compiled with support for the GNOME2 GUI and scripting support for Perl, Python, Ruby, and TCL.
This package provides the full vim command line editor and also the gvim GUI front-end of the same.
If you use vim and you haven’t installed the vim-full package you don’t know what you’re missing!
Thanks for this tip. I had no idea. Of course, “this’ll get the job done” vim is probably all I need, but I still feel cheated…
Do I hear :syntax on ???
Wow? Vim has the ability to be scripted in python?? Wow!
Please, kind sir! Can you cover this in a future tutorial? At least briefly?
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vim-gnome also provides support for the Gnome 2 GUI and it is an official package, I would stick with that.
If you need support for scripting languages you can also install vim-(perl|python|ruby|tcl). These packages list support for GTK2, just as vim-gtk. It gets quite confusing.
So scripting support for python means I can write Vim scripts in Python instead of Vim’s own uber-cryptic scripting language? How is this done?
I was aware of the limited install, but it would be nice if I knew (or if you knew and posted?) what the actual differences were!
you can see some differences by
$ /usr/bin/vim.basic –version
$ /usr/bin/vim.full –version
For vim.full there are a load of extra + items, and linked into lots of libraries.
In particular, vim .full has perl, python ruby and tcl enabled. Others can be guessed at …
For those of us who have a server running that does not use X, vim-full under Hardy will attempt to install a large number of X related packages, that perhaps you are not interested in installing.
By default Ubuntu installs vim-tiny, which has a non-intuitive way of handling arrow key presses across an ssh session. It moves the cursor of course, but not necessarily the way you want when you are in edit mode. Inserting new lines with A, D, C or B in them really wasn’t what I was hoping to do. You were?
For these situations, the ‘normal’ vim package does exist. I’m sure that vim-tiny is really handy for install situations, where you want to have the smallest possible editor based on the vim syntax. But that’s not what everyone is looking for. Try ‘sudo apt-get install vim’ and see if the resulting installed package takes care of your needs. It was a big help for me.
Vim-full is also handy on systems with X installed, but as noted, that’s not all of us.