Andrew Vos's Blog

You may have noticed that Homebrew doesn't include VIM in it's repositories. This is because they don't support "duplicates" which means that any command line tool that comes pre-installed with OS X will not be in their repository.

There is a workaround though and it involves using homebrew-alt.

Unfortunately the vim formula in homebrew-alt doesn't work if you happen to have Ruby 1.9.2 installed, so for now you'll have to use my fork.

# Install VIM
brew install https://raw.github.com/AndrewVos/homebrew-alt/master/duplicates/vim.rb

# Rename old vim to 'vim72' so that we can still access it if we need to
mv /usr/bin/vim /usr/bin/vim72

Now if you restart your terminal and check the VIM version you should see something like this:

$ vim --version
VIM - Vi IMproved 7.3 (2010 Aug 15, compiled Jul 23 2011 20:09:39)
MacOS X (unix) version

Great! You now have a more stable VIM.