The Vim SVN repository

Vim can now also be obtained using Subversion (SVN for short). Subversion allows developers to maintain a single, controlled source tree with multiple check-outs of individual files.

If you don't know how to use Subversion, you'll probably want to look at the documentation. It is similar to CVS, but includes many enhancements.

Browsing the Vim sources

You can browse the Subversion repository online at SourceForge. This shows the most recent version of the files in "vim7". You can view diffs to find out what the latest changes are.

Documentation on accessing the repository can be found on the SourceForge documentation page.

Obtaining Vim through Subversion

These are the simple instructions how to obtain the Vim files through SVN. Use this when you have a reasonable fast internet connection and want to compile Vim yourself. It should work well on any system that supports SVN.

Note: The SVN repository is updated regularly, but not immediately. Vim's SVN repository may be a few days behind the head of development. For information on patching Vim with the most up-to-date patches, consult the information on patches

Doing it for the first time

Go to a directory where you want the Vim source tree to appear. Use this command to get the latest stable version of Vim (it is one line):

svn co https://vim.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/vim/vim7

This will create the "vim7" directory and download all the Vim files and subdirectories into it.
You may get a warning about the certificate not being valid or untrusted. You'll have to accept the certificate somehow (how depends on your svn client). Complain to SourceForge if this bothers you.

Read the "vim/README.txt" file for how to compile Vim. For Unix it's simply "cd vim/src; make".

Updating

Recent patches appear all the time. Change into the "vim7" directory and include the changes with this single command:

svn update

You will get messages for all directories that are inspected and files that are being updated.

Unstable versions

There are other versions available in the SVN reposository. Currently there is no unstable version. If there was you would get this with:

svn co https://vim.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/vim/branches/vim7.x

To find out what other versions are available, use a browser to view https://vim.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/vim/branches/.




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