What is the difference between MacVim and regular Vim

Question

I m reasonably new to OS X  but I m familiar with Vim from using it in various  nix systems  I ve seen many people recommend running MacVim over Vim in the terminal  Can anyone tell me what differences there are between MacVim and regular Vim

User · Answer

unfortunately  with  mvim -v   ALT plus arrow windows still does not work  I have not found any way to enable it  -

User · Answer

MacVim is just Vim  Anything you are used to do in Vim will work exactly the same way in MacVim   MacVim is more integrated in the whole OS than Vim in the Terminal or even GVim in Linux  it follows a lot of Mac OS X s conventions   If you work mainly with GUI apps  YummyFTP   GitX   Charles  for example  you may prefer MacVim    If you work mainly with CLI apps  ssh   svn   tcpdump  for example  you may prefer vim in the terminal   Entering and leaving one realm  CLI  for the other  GUI  and vice-versa can be  expensive    I use both MacVim and Vim depending on the task and the context  if I m in CLI-land I ll just type vim filename and if I m in GUI-land I ll just invoke Quicksilver and launch MacVim   When I switched from TextMate I kind of liked the fact that MacVim supported almost all of the regular shortcuts Mac users are accustomed to  I added some of my own  mimiking TextMate but  since I was working in multiple environments I forced my self to learn the vim way  Now I use both MacVim and Vim almost exactly the same way  Using one or the other is just a question of context for me   Also  like El Isra said  the default vim  CLI  in OS X is slightly outdated  You may install an up-to-date version via MacPorts or you can install MacVim and add an alias to your  profile   alias vim   path to MacVim app Contents MacOS Vim    to have the same vim in MacVim and Terminal app   Another difference is that many great colorschemes out there work out of the box in MacVim but look terrible in the Terminal app which only supports 8 colors    highlights  but you can use iTerm     which can be set up to support 256 colors     instead of Terminal   So    basically my advice is to just use both   EDIT  I didn t try it but the latest version of Terminal app  in 10 7  is supposed to support 256 colors  I m still on 10 6 x at work so I ll still use iTerm2 for a while   EDIT  An even better way to use MacVim s CLI executable in your shell is to move the mvim script bundled with MacVim somewhere in your  PATH and use this command     mvim -v   EDIT  Yes  Terminal app now supports 256 colors  So if you don t need iTerm2 s advanced features you can safely use the default terminal emulator

User · Answer

The one reason I have which made switching to MacVim worth it  Yank uses the system clipboard    I can finally copy paste between MacVim on my terminal and the rest of my applications

User · Answer

It s all about the key bindings which one can simply achieve from  vimrc configurations  As far as clipboard is concerned you can use  set clipboard unnamed and the yank from vim will go to system clipboard  Anyways  whichever one you end up using I suggest using this vimrc config   it contains a whole lot of plugins and bindings which will make your experience smooth

[macos] What is the difference between MacVim and regular Vim?

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