12.11. Sources and Supported Operating Systems

The official WWW location for vile is http://invisible-island.net/vile/vile.html . The ftp location is ftp://invisible-island.net/vile/vile.tar.gz . The file vile.tar.gz is always a symbolic link to the current version.

vile is written in ANSI C. It builds and runs on UNIX, OpenVMS, MS-DOS, Win32 console and Win32 GUI, BeOS, QNX and OS/2.

Compiling vile is straightforward. Retrieve the distribution via ftp or from the web page. Uncompress and untar it, run the configure program, and then run make:

$ gzip -d < vile.tar.gz | tar -xvpf -
...
$ cd vile-*; ./configure
...
$ make
...

vile should configure and build with no problems. Use make install to install it.

If you want syntax coloring to work smoothly, you may wish to run configure with the following option: --with-builtin-filters. The developers also recommend that you use flex (e.g., version 2.54a) rather than lex, since UNIX versions of that tool do not perform well.

Should you need to report a bug or problem in vile, send email to the address <vile@nongnu.org> . This is the preferred way to report bugs. If necessary, you can contact Thomas Dickey directly at <dickey@invisible-island.net> .