I did successfully download the sources and compiled Vim on

Unix. But feature … still does not work. What is wrong and how can I fix it? You should first check, that you are actually running your self compiled Vim and not the system’s provided version. So first check your $PATH setting. Depending on your compile options, some features might not be included in your build of Vim. You can use the “:version” command to determine the Vim features that are enabled at compile time. The features that are enabled will be prefixed with a “+”. The features that are not enabled will be prefixed with a “-“. The easiest way to include all features is to build the huge version. To do this, you have to specify the –with-features option while running the configure script:

    $ ./configure --with-features=huge

Nevertheless, a feature could still be disabled at compile time, if the configure script can’t find the required libraries for those features (e.g. for clipboard integration, your Vim needs to be linked against the X11 development libraries). There are several ways to install the required libraries: 1) On a Debian based distribution, you can use the package manager “apt” to install all required dependencies. As superuser, run the command: $ apt-get build-dep vim-gtk This makes sure all required libraries needed to compile the vim-gtk package will be installed. (This requires, that your sources list contains deb-src entries. See your distribution manual on how to enable this, if the above command did not work.) 2) In openSUSE you can use the package manager “zypper” to install all required libraries. This requires, that there is a source version of the package installable from a configured repository (which by default is not the case). Use: $ zypper search -t srcpackage vim to find out, whether or not there exists a source version in the repository. If there is none, you’ll need to add a source repository. For openSUSE 11.2 you could use, e.g. $ zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/source/distribution/11.2/repo/oss/src-11.2 (one line) Once you have a source version available in your repositories, use this command to install all needed requirements: $ zypper source-install –build-deps-only vim 3) On a Fedora/RedHat based system, you can use $ yum-builddep vim-enhanced 4) Run configure with your options and watch for missing libraries: $ ./configure –with-features=huge 2>&1 |tee logfile This will run configure and record the output into the file “logfile”. You need to check the logfile for missing dependencies. Consider this output:

    checking --disable-gtktest argument... gtk test enabled

    checking for pkg-config... /usr/bin/pkg-config

    checking for GTK - version >= 2.2.0... no

Here you can see, that the gtk libraries are missing and therefore no GTK gui version can’t be build. So you need to install the GTK library in your system, with your package manager or by compiling it yourself. Then run the configure script again and check, that it finds the library. In theory, those provided dependencies by your distribution might still lack some libraries, that are needed for features, that simply are not enabled in your distribution and therefore those commands in 1-3 won’t install it. At the very least, this provides a jumping point and you need to track down the required missing packages using method 4 from above. But usually, this works good enough for most people and you won’t have to bother with the fourth method.