Instead of doing work, I got to thinking that since I spend so much time in vim, I should really build and configure vim from source, instead of just using the debian packaged vim-gtk31.

Also I should really contribute a little to vim over time. The only thing I’ve contributed back was a bug report about unicode character handling, which someone patched and Bram merged the same day(!).

So let’s keep a fork to track my config.

Building notes:

  • Certain system packages need to be installed for features like gui, ‘+perl’, ‘+python’
    • I won’t make an exhaustive list, but see src/INSTALL
    • make reconfig after installing

  1. 2026-09-01: I only found out within the last two weeks that debian in fact does package a “huge” build of vim without gvim called vim-nox (“vim no X”) ↩