Learning the vi and Vim Editors, 7th Edition

Customizing the Executable

For most users, the default Vim suffices nicely. Today’s computers provide enough processing power (memory and processing cycles) for the full-featured Vim executable. You get all of Vim’s extended features with the confidence of good performance. However, in some instances, environment or circumstance may dictate a more stripped down Vim.

Users may need Vim to take up a minimal footprint, for example, on a handheld device running Linux that has limited memory. Users may also have no use for compiled-in features such as spellcheck (because they may be programmers with no interest in features that mimic word processing) or perl (because perl may not be installed on their machines).

It’s much easier to live with the available features than to reconfigure, recompile, and reinstall Vim with all new options, just to add missing features.