MacVim is a wonderful tool in mac. It is a port of the text editor Vim to Mac OS X that is meant to look better and integrate more seamlessly with the Mac than the older Carbon port of Vim. This article show you how to run macvim from terminal.

Confusing about opening a gui windows when run mvim?

After you had your macvim installed and try to run the folllowing command:

$ mvim

A new gui window will be opened instead of just staying on terminal.

Try to reinstall your macvim with option --with-override-system-vim

$ brew install macvim --with-override-system-vim

it will create vi and vim command under /usr/local/bin/ and if you want to open a file from terminal using macvim, just type vi file or vim file . These two commands acted as mvim -v. That’s all.

Don’t want to reinstall macvim?

If you don’t want to reinstall your macvim, making a alias is a recommend way. And a line to you .bashrc or .zshrc.

$ alias vi='mvim -v'