I tried installing my dotfiles on an unmodified Ubuntu install. My vimrc threw many errors. Ubuntu and other Debian based distros install the tiny build of vim by default, which has a lot of features disabled, including eval
, but still loads the user vimrc. That means that many things that might be in there, including function
and even let
, do not exist in tiny. :help no-eval-feature
provides a solution: Wrap everything that should only work in +eval
capable versions of vim in if 1 … endif
.
Things that tiny does support include:
- most
set
. Ones that don’t exist don’t seem to throw an error from vimrc map
and variants, though what is mapped might not work when calledaugroup
andautocmd
, though events may not work right- some
filetype
.filetype plugin indent on
caused errors for me colorscheme
works, though no color schemes are installed. If I use one of the standard vim color scheme files, I get an error because of thelet
in themif
structures and any syntax in them are basically ignored
I went through and if’d the erroring stuff in my vimrc and now am able to get a tiny vim with at least some of my settings. I haven’t thoroughly tested this, and would most likely install regular vim on any machine I’m using long enough to install my dotfiles on anyway. This was just a quick fix for those rare cases where I’m in vim.tiny.