Purpose

Vim looks awesome using font with ligatures:

Use FiraCode or similar font for it.

Ligature support setup in GVim

After installing vim8-ligatures*.deb package you need to enable ligatures support in GVim.

Put in ~/.gvimrc line:

let g:gtk_nocache=[0x00000000, 0xfc00ffff, 0xf8000001, 0x78000001]

Setting font to Fira Code may look like:

set guifont=Fira\ Code\ 10

Automate build of Vim8 with ligatures

This repository provides build automation to

• check out latest version of Vim8 repository
• apply ligatures patch and build Vim8
• build debian package

Fully automated way

You will need Docker and docker-compose installed. Build is done inside Docker image to avoid polluting host system with all development packages.

Just run in top directory

docker-compose build
docker-compose up

Depending on your machine it will take 5-10 minutes to build Vim. Initial build of Docker image may take more time to fetch all dependency packages.

Resulting .deb file is in data directory, install it with

sudo dpkg -i data/vim8-ligatures_8.0.*.deb

Vim will install into /opt/vim8-ligatures/. You may need to create symlink to run it.

sudo ln -s /opt/vim8-ligatures/bin/gvim /usr/bin/gvim8-ligatures

Running build process manually

Create Docker image

docker build . -t vimbuilder:latest

Run build in container

docker run --rm -ti -v`pwd`/data:/data vimbuilder:latest /bin/bash

./build.sh

If you want to run separate steps in build process - check build.sh.

FAQ

Build process hangs on 'Copying files to the temporary directory...'

This is slowest part of checkinstall which is used to create package. Go drink some water or tea or coffee. It usually takes 5-10 minutes to assemble package with a lot of small files.