Sunday, May 20, 2012

FreeBSD Install VIM Editor Without X11 GUI

Q. I'm running FreBSD on an old PC and find that all the visual bells and whistles in FreeBSD X11 are really slowing things down. How do I install vim text editor under FreeBSD without using GUI (gvim) version? How do I build vim port without X11 GUI?

A. You can easily build VIM without X11 under FreeBSD. First, update your ports tree, using portsnap command, enter:
# portsnap fetch update
Install vim without X11, enter:
# cd /usr/ports/editors/vim
# make WITHOUT_X11=yes install clean

Optional: vim configuration

Copy /usr/local/share/vim/vimXY/vimrc_example.vim to /usr/local/share/vimrc, enter:
# cp /usr/local/share/vim/vim72/vimrc_example.vim /usr/local/share/vimrc
Create your ~/.vimrc file, enter:
$ vi ~/.vimrc
Add customization:
set nocompatible
filetype on
filetype indent on
filetype plugin on
set laststatus=2
syntax on
Save and close the file. Set bash alias, enter:
$ echo "alias vi='vim'" >> ~/.bashrc
Setup INPUTRC for bash, enter:
# echo 'export INPUTRC=/usr/local/etc/inputrc' >> /etc/profile
Finally, create /usr/local/etc/inputrc, enter:
# cat >> /usr/local/etc/inputrc
Append config:
set meta-flag on
set input-meta on
set convert-meta off
set output-meta on
"\e[1~": beginning-of-line
"\e[4~": end-of-line
"\e[5~": beginning-of-history
"\e[6~": end-of-history
"\e[3~": delete-char
"\e[2~": quoted-insert
"\e[5C": forward-word
"\e[5D": backward-word

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