Upgrading to Vim 7 on Dapper

I’m updating all my systems to Vim 7 because of the nifty new features such as the built in spell check and tabs. I don’t care that much about undo branches, but the above two features are quite awesome. :)

On my windows machine this went easy. All I had to do was to download the installer package, and follow the prompts. Now I have a working Vim 7 with no hassle. :)

On the JDS/SUSE machine at school it was similarly easy. I just grabbed the source, compiled it without any problems. I was pleasantly surprised because I usually can’t compile anything on that machine because of odd dependency conflicts (thank you very much Sun – no wonder you dropped this project).

On Kubuntu Dapper however I ran into a snag. There is only Vim 6.4 in repositories, and you cannot use the Edgy version because it was compiled against a different set of libraries. So the only way you can get Vim 7 on your machine is to grab the sources from Edgy repositories, and build them yourself.

Either that, or you can take the lazy way out and use the deb packages someone else already compiled on a Dapper system. I found a batch of them in the Ubuntu forums, and they worked just fine for me. You simply need to remove your current vim installation via apt, and then install these debs with straight dpkg.

To make the download easier I decided to mirror these debs here. I packaged them in a tar file so that you can download them in just one go. Simply extract and install. You can download the file here:

File: vim7_dapper_debs.tgz (31.3 MB)

Just a note - to enable the built in spell check you can just do:

:set spell

You can open tabs in console mode with:

:tabnew filename

You can switch between tabs by pressing gt. I really like this feature because it makes working with multiple buffers in a single window much easier.

What do you think of Vim 7?

[tags]vim, vim 7, ubuntu, dapper, vim 7 on dapper, backport, deb, packages, download[/tags]

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