What is Vim?

Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Read more.

Install the download and build dependencies

We can download package information from all configured sources:

$ sudo apt update

We need to install Git in order to download the latest version of Vim from the official repository:

$ sudo apt install -y git

In order to get the latest version of Vim, we’ll be compiling and installing the software from source. We need to satisfy the build dependencies so that we can compile the software. To do this, we can install the build-essential package:

$ sudo apt install -y build-essential

Download, compile and install Vim

We need to choose the target directory where we’ll download Vim. Let’s download in the /tmp/vim. Before downloading we need to try to remove /tmp/vim to ensure that this directory isn’t busy:

$ rm -fr /tmp/vim

Download Vim to /tmp/vim:

$ git clone https://github.com/vim/vim.git /tmp/vim

Compile the Vim binaries:

$ make -C /tmp/vim

Install the binaries into the system:

$ sudo make install -C /tmp/vim

We don’t need to keep the downloaded Vim binaries, so we can remove /tmp/vim:

$ rm -fr /tmp/vim

Successfully finishing all steps above we can use the latest vim. Enjoy!

All steps together:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

sudo apt update

sudo apt install -y git

sudo apt install -y build-essential

rm -fr /tmp/vim

git clone https://github.com/vim/vim.git /tmp/vim

make -C /tmp/vim

sudo make install -C /tmp/vim

rm -fr /tmp/vim