Compiling Vim from the source is actually not that difficult. Here’s what you should do:
Install all the prerequisite libraries sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev libgnome2-dev libgnomeui-dev libgtk2.0-dev libatk1.0-dev libbonoboui2-dev libcairo2-dev libx11-dev libxpm-dev libxt-dev python-dev ruby-dev mercurial Remove vim if you have it already sudo apt-get remove vim vim-runtime gvim vim-tiny vim-common vim-gui-common Compile source code Download source code You can get the source code here: http://www.vim.org/sources.php
Set Configuration cd vim ./configure \ --with-features=huge \ --enable-rubyinterp \ --enable-pythoninterp \ --enable-luainterp \ --enable-perlinterp \ --enable-multibyte \ --enable-sniff \ --enable-fontset \ --enable-cscope \ --enable-gui=gtk2 \ --prefix=/usr make VIMRUNTIMEDIR=/usr/share/vim/vim74 Install Vim sudo make install If you don’t get gvim working (on ubuntu 12.04 LTS), try changing --enable-gui=gtk2 to --enable-gui=gnome2