How to install the latest Vim on Ubuntu 16.04

What is Vim?

Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Read more.

Install the download and build dependencies

We can download package information from all configured sources:

$ sudo apt update

We need to install Git to download the latest version of Vim from the official repository:

$ sudo apt install -y git

We will compile and install the software from the source to get the latest version of Vim. We need to satisfy the build dependencies to compile the software. To do this, we can install the build-essential package:

$ sudo apt install -y build-essential

Download, compile, and install Vim

We need to choose the target directory where we will download Vim. Let's download it into /tmp/vim. Before downloading, we need to try to remove /tmp/vim to ensure that this directory is not busy:

$ rm -fr /tmp/vim

Download Vim to /tmp/vim:

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

Compile the Vim binaries:

$ make -C /tmp/vim

Install the binaries into the system:

$ sudo make install -C /tmp/vim

We do not need to keep the downloaded Vim binaries so that we can remove /tmp/vim:

$ rm -fr /tmp/vim

Successfully finishing all steps above, we can use the latest vim. Enjoy!

All steps together:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

sudo apt update

sudo apt install -y git

sudo apt install -y build-essential

rm -fr /tmp/vim

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

make -C /tmp/vim

sudo make install -C /tmp/vim

rm -fr /tmp/vim