Rubenerd

Shortly after posting my entry about building Vim from source because Homebrew preferred I install MacVim or use OS X's outdated version instead, Ibid commented that MacVim hides regular Vim inside its application bundle. A quick check confirms that it does! This is why I blog, to learn stuff from awesome people :).

My dad asked me once why I was typing “is”

For those who have installed it from the binary disk image:

% ls /Applications/MacVim.app/Contents/MacOS

MacVim* vim*

And from Homebrew, presuming you haven't symlinked it yet (reconstruct onto one line, ls doesn't like multi-line backslash!):

% ls $HOMEBREW_PATH/macvim/[version]

     /MacVim.app/Contents/MacOS

MacVim* vim*

MacVim is the the Cocoa version of Vim we've come to love, and Vim is indeed regular Vim!

Chrome has longer version numbers

At the time of writing, obviously this version of Vim lags a little behind what you'd get from building the source yourself (7.3.107 versus 7.3.108), but that's certainly far newer than the 7.2.x tree we're still on with Snow Leopard by default.

Unlike gvim builds of Vim which can just be called without the -gtk flag to render a regular emulator in the shell, MacVim is thoroughly a Cocoa application, so I presumed launching vanilla Vim wasn't possible. Building from source will give me the latest version, but I'm tempted just to use MacVim's version from now on, if only so then I have one less Vim floating around my system which I otherwise keep meticulously tidy!