any VIM users on Amiga? Setup question

[blatboy]

Greetings. I've been setting up a 3.9 system on a a3000 and am curious if any of you folks work in VIM on Amiga. I love the idea that it was originally developed on Amiga, and I already use VIM on my Linux and Mac systems.

I've installed 6.0 and 6.4 from Aminet. It's been wonky. Even when I have my VIM: pointing to the correct directory, the help.txt won't load up with a :help command. It keeps trying to point to VIM:/doc (which, due to the location of the / will generate an error) even though I've set it up with :helptags VIM:doc/

I see that up to 8.0 is available via GitHub (which is just nuts) but since I'm not even getting older versions to work... well..

I'm sure there's some PEBKAC going on here but if anyone has any insights, (are there folks who use VIM on Amiga?) it would be greatly appreciated.

[blatboy]

Well, for the record... I went back to 5.3. That seemed to fix the problems and it loads the help files and my .vimrc as it should. .vimrc wouldn't load on those other versions either... Could have been my error, but I don't see it. 5.3 seems to work. Perhaps they didn't debug the Amiga code after this version? Anyhoo, I'm not sure what features I'll be missing out on this version, but at least I'll be able to use it.

[Locutus]

So version 8 didn't work on Amiga anymore?

It's quite possible the code is still there and builds on CI but is never actually tested by a user so this goes unnoticed.

It sounds like a simple bug, where someone is always expecting unix style paths. Likely a very simple fix.

[blatboy]

I concur. It would be a simple fix most likely, but probably beyond my skills. Unless it's as simple as searching for "help.txt" in the source code, which I'm sure it's not.

Then there is the compiling itself..

I haven't tried 8.0. There are no binaries on aminet for it that I've seen. I haven't cracked open a C compiler since Lattice/SAS in the early 90s, so I'm a little intimidated, and that VIM package is huge. I wouldn't know where to start at this point. Sad, but true. (I've used gcc for wee little utilities and such on Linux, but that's it for post 1992 compiling hahah.)

[blatboy]

At the risk of more rabbit holing, I gave a college try w/compilation.

I installed Aztec 5.0. tried "make -f Make-manx.mak" as per the INSTALLami.txt instructions. I got a "FATAL error: can't open Make-manx.mak!" Not sure what's up with that.

Also note that in the other versions that didn't work for me (6.0 and 6.4) I tried setting the $VIM variable (let VIM = 'DH0:Vim/Vim64') and that didn't work either. (Considering re-trying that as I'm wondering if I had syntax issues) Assuming no syntax issues on my command, it does make me think it could be an issue with the code. I checked the "features.h" file to see if there was something in there that might have to do with path syntax, but I didn't see anything that made sense to me.

5.3 works like a charm tho.

[blatboy]

For the record, I downloaded Vim 5.8 from vim.org, and that seems to work ok on my setup.

[blatboy]

and I double checked 6.0 again. The problem arose. So, unless there is PEBKAC, it seems 5.8 is the last useable version...

[Wepl]

I'm using 6.3a which work well for me.
Concerning the : help function SnoopDos shows that vim always search for the help files on the current drive. This is a bit ugly.

[jadero]

Also had no luck with anything above version 5.8. I did add the following to my user-startup:

ASSIGN VIM: SYS:Programs/Vim
PATH VIM:vim58 ADD

Vim 5.8 will start with the usual greeting message and just works.

I then tried Vim 6.0 and 6.4 and they seem to have problems. Loading Vim takes longer and I end up with the file chooser dialogue for the current folder and somehow nothing works.
Also

:help

brings up an error message about missing tags. Running

:helptags $VIMRUNTIME/doc

creates the tags file but I still get the error message.

[blatboy]

with 3.1.4, no change here.
recently I had to set up home: to point to s:
for some reason vim was looking for .vimrc in home:
it's mentioned here, but home: isn't a standard that I know of
(not that it's not a thing, because I'm wrong a lot.)
so... 5.8 is working for me... 6.0 causes a guru

I'm happy to have VIM on my Amiga.

(but yeah...I'm starting to pine for some of my more bleeding edge plugs haha)