Overriding system vim on Mac

Question

I installed macvim via brew install macvim --override-system-vim. All appears to be well. When I do an ls -lart on /usr/local/bin here is what I get for the symlinks relative to vim:

vimex -> ../Cellar/macvim/7.3-66/bin/vimex      
vimdiff -> ../Cellar/macvim/7.3-66/bin/vimdiff
vim -> ../Cellar/macvim/7.3-66/bin/vim
view -> ../Cellar/macvim/7.3-66/bin/view
vi -> ../Cellar/macvim/7.3-66/bin/vi
mvimex -> ../Cellar/macvim/7.3-66/bin/mvimex
mvimdiff -> ../Cellar/macvim/7.3-66/bin/mvimdiff
mvim -> ../Cellar/macvim/7.3-66/bin/mvim
mview -> ../Cellar/macvim/7.3-66/bin/mview
gvimex -> ../Cellar/macvim/7.3-66/bin/gvimex
gvimdiff -> ../Cellar/macvim/7.3-66/bin/gvimdiff
gvim -> ../Cellar/macvim/7.3-66/bin/gvim
gview -> ../Cellar/macvim/7.3-66/bin/gview

Additionally, running which vim yields /usr/local/bin/vim. However, when I run vim from terminal I get version 7.3 rather than 7.3.754 that I get when I run /usr/local/Cellar/macvim/7.3-66/bin/vim directly. What am I missing here, as it is obviously not the same.

Solution 1

The symlink looks fine. Try to restart your terminal. Could be some caching issue.

Solution 2

The system vim is in /usr/bin. If your path has /usr/bin before /usr/local/bin, you would get the system vim. Check your path with "echo $PATH" in the terminal.

Comments

[Blanka]

bash was probably hashing (i.e. caching) your old PATH. Restarting the shell fixes it, but if you're ever in that situation again just do hash -r vim to clear the cache for vim.