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I know this question has been asked in many various forms, but I have not yet been able to get any of the answers to work. If anybody can point me in the right direction, it would be greatly appreciated.

The Issue(s)

I've got MacVim installed on an iMac running High Sierra - I want to purely run console vim as it integrates with ranger much better (and therefore makes file organisation a breeze). Currently, vim --version returns

VIM - Vi IMproved 8.0 (2016 Sep 12, compiled Jan 18 2020 06:05:14)
Included patches: 1-503, 505-680, 682-1283, 1365
Compiled by root@apple.com

indicating that Apple's vim is in fact recognised. brew will install vim but it won't symlink it and returns the following error after brew link vim:

Error: Could not symlink share/man/de/man1/ex.1
/usr/local/share/man/de/man1 is not writable.

My whole escapade that led me to here is because I need vim to run with +python3 but, as mentioned before in other answers, Apple's vim uses python2. Recently brew would install and symlink vim, but for whatever reason it has ceased to do so. My question is twofold:

1) How can I get brew to successfully symlink its version of vim?

2) What do I need to do to get brew's vim to be my primary vim (as it is installed with python3)?

Additional Info

Here are a couple threads I've found that have not worked as of yet:

The best way to make MacVim's vim (console, not mvim) the default instead of Mac OS X's vim? uses a deprecated method which no longer works with brew

How do I install vim on OSX with Python 3 support? this method works, along with an important addition mentioned in my answer. See below.

Any help or advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

S. Thornhill
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1 Answers1

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Turns out I answered my own question. Here's what I did:

1) The answer is don't use brew. I installed vim using MacPorts instead. See https://www.macports.org/ for information and installation instructions. Also see my second link in OP. To install vim with MacPorts, do

sudo port install vim +python37

You can check all the variants MacPorts offers by doing

port variant vim

To uninstall vim, simply do

sudo port uninstall vim

2) I edited my ~/.bash_profile file in the following way:

PATH="/Users/user/Applications/MacVim.app/Contents/MacOS/${PATH}"
export PATH

After these two changes, my vim --version in fact returned +python3 and I no longer got an error to do with vim being compiled with python instead of python3.

Hope this can help someone else out in the future.

S. Thornhill
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