Vim With Ruby Support Using Homebrew

Jul 31, 2011 · 1 minute read

I’ve spend a bit of time this weekend cleaning, tidying and upgrading software on my mac. While doing that I got round to compiling my own Vim. I’d been meaning to do this for a while, I prefer using Vim in a terminal to using MacVim, and I like having access to things like Command-T which requires Ruby support which the inbuild version lacks.

Vim isn’t in Homebrew, because Homebrew’s policy is to not provide duplicates of already installed software. Enter Homebrew Alt which provides formulas for anything not allowed by the homebrew policy. As luck would have it a Vim Formula already exists. And installing from it couldn’t be easier.

brew install https://raw.github.com/adamv/homebrew-alt/master/duplicates/vim.rb

As it turns out this failed the first time I ran it because I had an rvm installed Ruby on my path. I reset this to the system version and everything compiled fine.

rvm use system

Note also that it’s really quite simple to use a different revision or different flags when compiling. Just download that file, modify it, serve it locally (say with a python one line web server) and point brew install at it. Next step, running off head for all the latest and greatest Vim features.