Updating VIM on OS X

The version of Vim that comes with OS X is a little old, but more importantly, it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles enabled.

Specifically, it doesn’t come with ruby and python support compiled in. Which is a shame, because some plugins for Vim need it.

I’ve been playing with Vim since a couple months ago when I was pair programming with a co-worker, Shawn. Shawn prefers Vim and he is very good at it.

To make pair programming easier, I decided to improve my very basic Vim skills. As part of that, I created a new .vimrc based on Shawn’s. I then went further and included Vundle and started looking at various packages.

We used this .vimrc during our pair programming and pushed it up as a Homedir package at http://github.com/docwhat/homedir-vim. I’ve successfully used this .vimrc on Windows (via Cygwin) and Centos version 5.6 and 6.2, as well as on the Mac. You can bypass Homedir entirely and just download the .vimrc directly.

However, to use some of the spiffy bits of my .vimrc on my Mac, I needed a Vim with all the extras. Here’s how you do it easily:

1. Install Homebrew.
2. Add the “duplicates tap”. This adds formulas for apps that duplicate the build-in OS X functionality: brew tap homebrew/dupes
3. Install Vim: brew install vim

That’s it. Easy-peasy!

Ciao!

UPDATE 2016/02/29: My .vimrc has been moved into my dotfiles repository.