Learning the vi and Vim Editors, 7th Edition

Getting Vim for Windows Environments

There are two main options for Microsoft Windows. The first is the self-installing executable, gvim.exe, available from the Vim home page. Download and run this, and it should do the rest. We have installed Vim using this executable on different Windows machines, and it’s always worked cleanly. The binary should install correctly on Windows XP, 2000, NT, ME, 98, and 95.

Note

At one point in the install process, a DOS window pops up and gives a warning about something not being verifiable. We have never seen this become a problem.

Another option for Windows users is to install Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/), a suite of common GNU tools ported to the Windows platform. It’s an amazingly full implementation of virtually all mainstream software used on Unix platforms. Vim is part of the standard Cygwin installation and can run from a Cygwin shell window.

Using Vim with Cygwin

The text-based console Vim works fine in Cygwin, but Cygwin’s gvim expects an X Window System server to be running and will degrade gracefully into running text-based Vim if started without this server.

To get Cygwin’s gvim working (assuming you wish to run it on a local screen), start Cygwin’s X server from the command line in a Cygwin shell as follows:

$X -multiwindow &

The -multiwindow option tells the X server to let Windows manage the Cygwin applications. There are many other ways to use Cygwin’s X server, but that discussion is outside the scope of this book. Installation of Cygwin’s ...