Friday, September 12, 2008

HowTo: Install Vim WITHOUT X11

I like Vim and I like using those cool colour schemes available for the editor.

So in my ingenuity I changed directory to /usr/ports/editors/vim and ran make install clean... big mistake! It tried to install all sorts of X11 related stuff and of course X11 itself. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, however on a 266 MHZ headless server I really don't want a GUI of any sorts.

To address the situation I read the port's Makefile and noticed several options that could be passed on the make step, namely WITHOUT_X11.

Here's how to install Vim without X11:
  1. % su
  2. # cd /usr/ports/editors/vim
  3. # make WITHOUT_X11=yes NO_GUI=yes LITE=yes install clean
  4. # rehash
And that's it.

Now I can finally use those cool colour schemes again. :D

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