Vim

I’m assuming you’d rather not compile Vim for Windows yourself. I don’t blame you. I tried it and it’s a nightmare.

These are manual steps, unfortunately. 🙁

For the best vim experience you should get the version compiled with Ruby and Python support.

Ruby and Python support does not necessarily mean that you will be coding in Ruby or Python, but many of the plugins that you will want to use require vim integration with Ruby and Python.

These instructions assume you are working in a Powershell console and that Chocolatey is installed.

Install Ruby

choco install ruby -Version 2.0.0.59800

If you need other version of ruby, go ahead and install them now.

Uru

You only need to install uru if you are using multiple rubies. Rvm does not work on Windows and Pik is no longer supported. Uru works fine.

Install Uru

You’ll need to add your ruby installations to uru using

uru admin add /path/to/ruby/bin

Installing Python

choco install Python2

Install Vim

Now you are ready to install vim.
Unfortunately, the version available on Chocolately.org is hard to get to work with Ruby and Python on Windows.
However, Alexander Shukaev (Haroogan) has compiled a version that works nicely.

Download Vim from Here

Extract the zip file where you want it and make sure the location of vim.exe is in the path before any other vims on your system (for example, if you have msysgit installed).

Verification

If this works, you should be able to execute the following commands in vim.

:echo has('ruby') => 1
:echo has('python') => 1

Install .vimrc

I keep my .vimrc file as a gist.

I clone it into my C:\git directory.

git clone https://gist.github.com/crmckenzie/4913add34cd30abd4b93 vimrc

Then I create a symlink from my $HOME directory to the vimrc file. This allows me to maintain the file across machines using git as a synchronization tool.

From powershell

cmd /C mklink .vimrc C:\git\vimrc\.vimrc

The “cmd /C” section is necessary in Powershell because not all cmd.exe commands have been ported yet.

Install Vundle

Vundle is a package manager for Vim. It uses github as a package source. This is about as easy as it gets 🙂

git clone https://github.com/gmarik/Vundle.vim.git ~/.vim/bundle/Vundle.vim

Install Bundles

Open vim and run

:BundleInstall

This should download the bundles specified in .vimrc

I’ll maintain this documentation in my configure-win-dev-workstation repo.