Vim working natively on Android phones

Introduction

I own a HTC Dream. While one may discuss on its usability as a phone, it makes a great portable Internet access machine. I have installed a Debian chroot on this machine and used to boot it when I wanted to edit some stuff on the go-it had V IM, git, svn and anything else need. It is, however, tiring to enable it each and every time I wanted to edit something, and it used up some memory this only Could is freed by rebooting.

So I ' ve grabbed the NDK and built Vim for Android

Screenshot

Warning

This is only works for rooted phones. I have only tested it on G1 a.k.a. HTC Dream.

Download

Grab this archive with Vim 7.3 for Android.

Install using computer and ADB

ADB push vim-android.tar.gz/sdcardadb shell# su# CD/# tar-zxf/sdcard/vim-android.tar.gz# ^d

After this step, you should has a vim binary in/data/local/bin/vim-the directory should is in your $PATH, but can Ensure by typing:

# echo $PATH

Install using your phone only

Connect to your phone's shell using Connectbot, Better Terminal or other software. Then type as following:

$ su# CD/# wget-o-http://gdr.geekhood.net/gdrwpl/heavy/vim-android.tar.gz | TAR-ZXF-

Details

Vim is built using NDK. This means it doesn ' t link statically to libc or any libraries that is already present. The only library it had built-in is ncurses.

All vim-specific files is placed In/data/local/usr/share. It's equipped in syntax highlighting for VIM and shell files and some scripts I found in Ubuntu ' s vim distribution. More scripts can installed To/data/local/usr/share/vim. The default VIMRC file can also is found in that directory. The package also have a terminfo database stolen from Ubuntu-it's needed for color display. It ' s placed in/data/local/usr/share/terminfo

The list of options can be viewed Here:vim--version output. Mouse support are available if you apply my patches to Connectbot (vote for it inclusion into mainline!)

The binary size is about 1.3 MB.

Source

Put the content of the source pack in the sources/directory of Android NDK. Chdir to, directory and issue ndk-build to produce Vim binary in Libs/armeabi/vim.

The actual sources is in jni/directory. Ncurses is to being found in jni/ncurses/

Vim ' s auto/config.h and other automatically generated files is generated by./configure running on Ubuntu and tweaked mans Ually. Similar thing is do to ncurses ' curses.priv.h.

Simply relacing the source files with newer vim and rebuilding should does the trick of upgrading to the latest version. Adding new files to Android.mk could also be needed.

Vim working natively on Android phones