Make Homebrew installed Vim override system installed one
The output of both brew info vim
and type -a vim
clearly states that Homebrew provided version of vim is not installed on your system.
It appears that you have both ex-vi
and mac-vim
installed which are conflicting formula for vim
. Trying to install vim
by running brew install vim
while ex-vi
and mac-vim
are installed results in the following error:
$ brew install vim
Error: Cannot install vim because conflicting formulae are installed.
ex-vi: because vim and ex-vi both install bin/ex and bin/view
Please `brew unlink ex-vi` before continuing.
Unlinking removes a formula's symlinks from /usr/local. You can
link the formula again after the install finishes. You can --force this
install, but the build may fail or cause obscure side effects in the
resulting software.
If you wish to use the latest version of vim
, you'll need to uninstall ex-vi
and mac-vim
by running:
brew uninstall ex-vi macvim
Now install vim
by running brew install vim
. Once the installation is successful, you can confirm the same by running type -a vim
, which should output:
vim is /usr/local/bin/vim
vim is /usr/bin/vim
Resolution
The Homebrew installed vim
was not linked. To link it requires running:
brew link vim
which gave the following error:
$brew link vim
Linking /usr/local/Cellar/vim/8.1.1550...
Error: Could not symlink share/man/de/man1/ex.1
/usr/local/share/man/de/man1 is not writable.
The error can be resolved by fixing the permission by running:
sudo chown -R `whoami`:admin /usr/local/share/man/de/man1
Followed by finally attempting the link again by running:
brew link vim
This will link to Homebrew installed vim
binaries under /usr/local/bin
and thus Hombrew installed copy of vim
will take precedence over system installed copy.
I was facing the same issue, I tried the solution proposed by @Nimesh Neema but the vim version was still showing older version. Apparently restarting the shell fixed it:
exec -l $SHELL
Before: VIM - Vi IMproved 8.0 (2016 Sep 12, compiled Jun 19 2019 19:08:44) After: VIM - Vi IMproved 8.2 (2019 Dec 12, compiled Feb 29 2020 01:58:02)