Learning the vi and Vim Editors, 7th Edition

Where to Get Vim

If your environment is some variant of Unix—including Mac OS X—you may be in luck and already have Vim installed. If it’s available and executable in your predefined PATH environment variable, you should be able to type vim at the shell command line and open a Vim window. If you get the following typical Unix error message:

sh: command not found: vim

try vi and see whether a Vim welcome message appears. Your installation may actually substitute Vim for vi.

On many systems you’ll find old versions of Vim. This section may therefore be useful to help you install the latest version, even if you have Vim already. Once you are in the editor, check not only that you are running Vim but also the version with the :version command. Vim will provide a screen resembling this:

:version VIM - Vi IMproved 7.0 (2006 May 7, compiled Aug 30 2006 21:54:03) Included patches: 1-76 Compiled by corinna@cathi Huge version without GUI. Features included (+) or not (-): +arabic +autocmd -balloon_eval -browse ++builtin_terms +byte_offset +cindent -clientserver -clipboard +cmdline_compl +cmdline_hist +cmdline_info +comments +cryptv +cscope +cursorshape ... +profile -python +quickfix +reltime +rightleft -ruby +scrollbind +signs +smartindent -sniff +statusline -sun_workshop +syntax +tag_binary +tag_old_static -tag_any_white -tcl +terminfo +termresponse +textobjects +title -toolbar +user_commands +vertsplit +virtualedit +visual +visualextra +viminfo +vreplace +wildignore +wildmenu +windows +writebackup ...