How To Install Vim on Ubuntu

Vim is a highly configurable and extensible text editor designed for efficient text editing. It is a modal editor, meaning that it has different modes for editing and navigating text, allowing users to perform complex editing tasks with minimal keystrokes.

Vim is written in C and is available on a variety of operating systems, including Unix, Linux, and Windows. It is often a popular choice among programmers and system administrators for editing source code, configuration files, and other types of text-based files. Vim offers a wide range of features, including syntax highlighting, auto-completion, macro recording, plugin support, and many more.

In this tutorial, we will cover the various methods and techniques we can use to install and configure the Vim editor on Ubuntu.

Requirements

• An Ubuntu System
• Administrative permissions to install and configure packages.
• Ncurses Lib
• Network Connection
• Build Tools such as git, make, build-essentials, gcc, etc.

Method 1 - Install Vim Via Package Manager

The simplest and most straightforward method to have Vim on your Ubuntu system is to use the default package manager.

Start by updating the repository index with the command:

sudo apt-get update

Next, run the command below to install Vim.

sudo apt-get install vim -y

This command should download the latest Vim editor and configure it on your system.

Method 2 - Installing Vim (Snap)

We can also use the Ubuntu snap system to install the vim editor on your system. Ensure the snap system is installed with the command:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install snapd

Install Vim with the command:

sudo snap install --classic vim

Method 3 - Build Vim

You can also manually build the Vim package from source. Start by installing the required packages with the command:

sudo apt install libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev git make gcc build-essential -y

The command above will the required packages such as ncurses, git, make, gcc, build-essential, etc.

The next step is to download Vim from the official repository. You can run the command below to clone the repo:

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

Once the repository has been cloned, navigate into the src directory and run the make command as:

cd vim

Make:

sudo make

This will initialize the build process.

Once the build process is complete, run the command below to install and configure Vim on your system.

sudo make install

You can verify by running the command:

vim -v

Confirm the installed version.

How to Uninstall Vim

To remove Vim, we can run the command:

sudo apt remove vim -y

Or:

sudo make uninstall

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you discovered how you can install Vim editor on your Ubuntu system using APT, SNAP, and Make. We hope you enjoyed this tutorial.

You can check out other tutorials shown below to expand your knowledge.