John Vim - Parabellum

I would be digressing but the parallels between John Wick and Vim are too many. Both of them are fine craftsmen of their meteir, surgical and deliberate at every step, at their prime all their actions are well thought of and are operatic. It’s not what they do, but how they accomplish their raison d’etre that makes them what they are today.

Vim8 was a big bang release unleashing a wealth of goodies to all us vim enthusiasts. But trying the latest vim out was challenging, because I was circumscribe by my choice of linux distribution. A PPA is definitely a way out of my quagmire, but I prefer not to use a random PPA for the lack of trust. Vim8 was a dream that I forgot about until my laptop crashed and I bought an OTC Ubuntu 18.04 laptop.

8.1 is a minor release but I couldn’t wait another laptop cycle to get my hands on. So, I decided to chose the red pill and compile vim from source.

Theoretically compiling vim from source should be simple:

$ git clone https://github.com/vim && cd vim
$ ./configure
$ make && make install

But the devil is in the details. Here’s the exact steps that one needs to follow:

$ git clone https://github.com/vim && cd vim
$ ./configure \
--with-features=huge \
--enable-multibyte \
--enable-rubyinterp=yes \
--enable-python3interp=yes \
--with-python3-config-dir=/usr/lib/python3.6/config-3.6m-x86_64-linux-gnu/ \
--enable-perlinterp=yes \
--enable-luainterp=yes \
--enable-gui=gtk \
--enable-cscope \
--prefix=${local_bin} \
$ make && make install

Some salient points in this setup are:

1. I tried using pyenv’s path for python3-config-dir, it does not work.
2. Python 2 and 3 cannot interop in ubuntu as explained here

Hopefully, this helps a forlorn developer searching for the oasis.