Downloading Vim


Vim is available for many different systems and there are several versions. This page will help you decide what to download.

Most popular:

MS-Windows: Click this link to download the self-installing executable (vim-win32-installer site (gvim_8.2.0012_x86_signed.exe is recommended)
Unix: See the GitHub page, or Mercurial, if you prefer that.
Mac: See the MacVim project

Details and options for:

  • Unix
  • PC: MS-DOS and MS-Windows
  • Amiga
  • OS/2
  • Macintosh
  • Others
Mirrors Alternative sites to download Vim files from.
Sources Build Vim yourself and/or make changes.
GitHub Obtain Vim sources with a git client (recommended).
Mercurial Obtain Vim sources with a Mercurial client (recommended if you don't like git).
Patches Include the latest improvements (requires sources and rebuilding).
Runtime Get the latest syntax files, documentation, etc..
Script links Links to individual syntax, indent, color, compiler and ftplugin scripts.
Translations Non-English documentation packages.

Versions before 7.3 can also be obtained with Subversion and CVS.

Version

Vim 8.2 is the latest stable version. It is highly recommended, many bugs have been fixed since previous versions. If you have a problem with it (e.g., when it's too big for your system), you could try version 6.4 or 5.8 instead.

To avoid having to update this page for every new version, there are links to the directories. From there select the files you want to download. In the file names ## stands for the version number. For example, vim##src.zip with version 8.2 is vim82src.zip and vim-##-src.tar.gz for version 8.2 is vim-8.2-src.tar.gz. Links are provided for quick access to the latest version.
Note that the links point to the latest version (currently 8.2) to avoid that caching causes you to get an older version.


GitHub page.

Summary:

git clone https://github.com/vim/vim.git
cd vim/src
make
Using Mercurial
This is another simple and most efficient way to obtain the latest version, including all patches. This requires the "hg" command.
The explanations are on this page: Mercurial

Summary:

hg clone https://bitbucket.org/vim-mirror/vim
cd vim/src
make
version 7.x and 8.x
There is one big file to download that contains almost everything. It is found in the unix directory (vim-8.2.tar.bz2 (http://packages.debian.org/vim.
  • Sun Solaris Vim is included in the Companion Software: http://wwws.sun.com/software/solaris/freeware/.
    Vim for other Sun systems can be found at http://sunfreeware.com/.
  • HPUX with GTK GUI for various HPUX versions: http://hpux.its.tudelft.nl/hppd/hpux/Editors/vim-6.2/ or http://hpux.connect.org.uk/hppd/hpux/Editors/vim-6.2/ (note that the remark about the GNU GPL is wrong)
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    gvim82.exe (vim-win32-installer
    It supports many interfaces, such as Perl, Tcl, Lua, Python and Ruby. There are also 64bit versions which only run on 64 bit MS-Windows and use a lot more memory, but is compatible with 64 bit plugins.
    You can also get a nightly build from there with the most recent improvements, with a small risk that something is broken.

    Since there are so many different versions of MS operating systems, there are several versions of Vim for them.
    For Vim 5.x, Vim 6.x and Vim 7 look in the pc directory (gvim82.exe (vim82rt.zip (gvim82.zip (gvim82ole.zip (vim82w32.zip (vim73_46d32.zip (vim71d16.zip (libiconv

    A library used for converting character sets. Put "iconv.dll" in the same directory as gvim.exe to be able to edit files in many encodings. You can find the dll file in the bin directory of the "libiconv-win32" archive.
    newer intl library   libintl
    The included libintl.dll does not support encoding conversion. If you have installed the iconv library, as mentioned above, you can install a gettext library that uses it. Get "intl.dll" from the bin directory in the gettext-win32 archive and store it as "libintl.dll" in the same directory as gvim.exe, overwriting the file that may already be there.
    PC sources   vim##src.zip    vim82src.zip (gvim82.pdb (gvim82ole.pdb (vim80w32.pdb (vim72lang.zip (Yongwei's build, executables with slightly different interfaces supported.
    Cream
    Cream. The "one-click installer" mentioned includes the Cream changes. For the "real Vim" use the "without Cream" version listed further down.
    Unfortunately, it stopped updating since Vim 8.0.
    Cygwin
    For a Cygwin binary look at others.

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    the amiga directory (os4depot.net. This is for AmigaOS 4. Made by Peter Bengtsson.

    Runtime files   vim##rt.tgz    vim64rt.tgz (vim64bin.tgz (vim64src.tgz (TOP


    the os2 directory (vim70rt.zip (vim70os2.zip (TOP


    https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim

    New versions are made quite often. Subscribe to the vim-mac maillist to be informed about bugs and updates.

    Carbon

    Recent binaries for Mac OS/X can be found on this SourceForge project. Maintained by Nicholas Stallard.

    Others

    There is also a version for Mac OSX that works in a terminal window and a GUI version for X11 with GTK (produced by Marc Liyanage):
    http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/welcome.html#vim

    Here is a multi-byte version of Vim 5.7 (for Japanese, possibly also for Korean and Chinese; not for Unicode):
    http://www-imai.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~asai/macvim-e.html

    Most of the work for the Macintosh port (Classic and Carbon) was done by Dany St-Amant.

    If you have OSX and a setup for compiling programs, you can use the Unix and Extra source code archives and compile yourself. See the Unix section above.The development tools can be downloaded from Apple's developer web site. Hint: stuffit expander can handle .bz2 files. Turn to the vim-mac maillist to meet other Vim-Mac users.