How To Install Vim Text Editor on CentOS 8

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Vim Text Editor on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, VI is a screen-oriented text editor created for UNIX operating system originally. It was created by Bram Moolenaar in 1991 and released under the license that includes some charityware clauses encouraging the users to help the poor children of Uganda. It is basically the enhanced version of Vi Editor. Vim stands for Vi improved.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Vim Text Editor on a CentOS 8 server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 8.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Vim Text Editor on CentOS 8

Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.

sudo dnf clean all
sudo dnf update

Step 2. Installing Vim Text Editor on CentOS 8.

Run the following command to install vim:

sudo dnf install vim

To set the VIM editor as the default system-wide editor copy, paste, and execute the following lines in your terminal:

# cat /etc/profile.d/vim.sh
export VISUAL="vim"
export EDITOR="vim"
EOF

To set the VIM editor as the default user editor copy, paste, and execute the following lines in your terminal:

$ cat ~/.bash_profile
export VISUAL="vim"
export EDITOR="vim"
EOF

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Vim. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Vim Text Editor on your CentOS 8 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official Vim Text Editor website.