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I’m using my wife’s MacBook Pro to see if it would be reasonably painless to integrate a MacBook laptop into my Linux workflow.

It seems like the main port of gVim to Mac is MacVim which requires Xcode to compile. If it takes 4GB of Xcode to compile a lightweight (~10MB) editor like Vim I must be going down the wrong path.

I also tried Mac OS X Vim from SourceForge, but that was just broken and I didn’t want to spend the time fighting with it.

I just want a lightweight editor not a full blown 4GB IDE. I’m really surprised I’m getting hung up on Vim support on a UNIX based machine. I want a GUI version of Vim since I’m not a Vim jedi yet.

Any suggestions?

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  • Upvoted, because I agree that you shouldn’t have to install all of XCode if you otherwise have no use for it. But I think in general if you’re on Mac and you’re a superuser, you really should at least at a minimum have homebrew installed (because it brings in a lot of very useful tools), and as long as you’re going to already have homebrew installed, it’s cheap and easy to install vim+macvim. Sep 27, 2015 at 22:35
  • Thanks for the upvote. I guess I don't understand the role that Xcode plays in getting macvim to work. Am I going to be opening a 4GB IDE everytime I want to do some basic editing in gvim? BTW, I do have homebrew installed. It's when I run brew install macvim that I get the error saying I need xcode. Sep 27, 2015 at 22:49
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    Yeah I guess the problem is that that if you want to build a vim on OS X, you need XCode. And homebrew builds packages from sources (I think). But you (and most people) don’t want/need to build it. Hence, macvim (which I think is the real answer here). Sep 27, 2015 at 22:53
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    @Canaryyellow: You won't need to open a 4GB IDE every time you want to use gvim, you only need Xcode to compile it, not to run it. Once it's compiled you could remove Xcode and free up the space again.
    – dreamlax
    Sep 27, 2015 at 22:56
  • Thanks for the comments. New to OS X and didn't know about Xcode. I have macvim working now. Sep 28, 2015 at 18:39

1 Answer 1

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https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim/releases/latest/download/MacVim.dmg will give you the latest MacVim release from https://github.com/macvim-dev/macvim/releases.


latest macvim release from github

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    Upvoted since this is a good and useful approach, didn't accept since I used the comments to solve my problem and understand the necessity of Xcode. Thanks. Sep 28, 2015 at 18:41

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