No Terminal Library Found when Compiling Vim

Question

I am running Ubuntu 12.04.

I'm trying to a get a particular plugin for vim working and it requires that vim has ruby support enabled (the plugin is command-t).

People tell me that I must go into my vim directory and run

./configure --enable-rubyinterp

When i do this i get the following error:

    no terminal library found
checking for tgetent()... configure: error: NOT FOUND!
      You need to install a terminal library; for example ncurses.
      Or specify the name of the library with --with-tlib.

Now I’ve checked and ncurses-base is installed.

What do I need to do?

Answer 1

I think you should install a ncurses-dev library.

you can do so by running sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev

Answer 2

Run sudo apt-get build-dep vim to install all the packages that was used to build the vim package from the repositories.

Answer 3

if you don't have sudo access, the solution is as follows:

download the latest (or whichever) release of ncurses from http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/ncurses/

run these bash commands:

mkdir ~/usr/local
cd <path_to_ncurses>
tar xzvf <ncurses>.tar.gz # change the tar command if it is not a tar.gz
cd <ncurses>
./configure --prefix=$HOME/usr/local
make
make install
cd <path_to_vim>
LDFLAGS=-L$HOME/usr/local/lib ./configure # then add any options e.g. --prefix=$HOME/usr/local
make
make install

And there you go. It's not often that people don't have sudo access to a machine, but this was my case, and this thread didn't provide the information I needed :) Now it does

Answer 4

I'm running ubuntu 16.10 and couldn't get vim 8.0 to compile. Googling the issue told me to install a package ncurses-dev but I couldn't find that package. I finally found that installing package libtinfo-dev did the trick and I was able to compile vim.

Answer 5

Based on my experience, I did sudo apt-get install libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev.

I was on Ubuntu 14.04. It worked.