1

I am very, very new to vim and using it through the mac terminal app. Based on this snip bit and the terminal being native to osx, I am trying to avoid macvim or iTerm at this point, so have not tried the fixes related to running vim through these.

I am hoping to answer something equivalent to this question for Yosemite. I am using vim-latex cloned from the source-forge site. There is a lot of discussion in the various documentations found on source-forge, github, and the like. I have not found the specific mention of the terminal. I am hoping someone has already solved this problem and willing to share it! Even better would be some explanation to more clearly understand what is going on under the hood. Obviously, I do not understand synctex, but a high level understanding would be nice.

Thank you!

Community
  • 1
Charlie
  • 13
  • 3

1 Answers1

1

I can't speak directly to using Vim in the default OSX Terminal, but:

Which Vim are you using? I would recommend against using system / Apple-shipped Vim, as you will be unable to update this effectively. As Andrew notes, a good alternate source for Vim is to use homebrew to install an up-to-date version of Vim.

The built-in Terminal has some differences from, say, *nix-based terminal interfaces; specifically, color support is simply different. You may experience---using system Vim or a custom installation of Vim---that colors do not work "properly" (as you'd expect) when using the system Terminal. There are workarounds for this; my personal experience was that using iTerm2 is the easiest and best workaround.

The Terminal shipped with OSX is not updated as regularly as open-source terminals, hence one advantage to using iTerm2: it is currently-maintained and developed software. Colors with Vim tend to be easier than with Terminal. The only differences are cosmetic, for the most part, between iTerm2 and Terminal (and urxvt and gnome-terminal and any other terminal app). Of more relevance is the shell you are using (likely Bash), and I suspect your problem will be resolved regardless of the terminal in use. It's usually safe to assume that instructions online work within Bash.

I see no reason the Lin Chen link you posted would work differently depending on the terminal you are using. Have you tried that yet?

Also, my experience is that color support (and all-around OSX interoperability) is much better using MacVim. The bug you posted is from a no-longer-maintained MacVim repo, and is specific to use of the MacVim GUI. It is possible to use MacVim from the commandline---mvim -m. That way, you are using an actively-updated version of Vim.

Henry
  • 126
  • Thank you for this incredibly thorough response. MacVim has been a much, much better experience. The vim in the terminal is a little clanky. For instance, the response to the trackpad mouse is terrible. In MacVim, it doesn't have the same problem. Didn't know that the Terminal app isn't as frequently updated as iTerm, so will definitely check out the latter. Thank you again! – Charlie Jul 15 '15 at 02:00