… from source when you’re using the homebrew-provided Python.

If you have installed Python via homebrew, your vim will compile fine but when a plugin tries to use Python to do some its work, vim will crash like this:

Not pretty.

Apparently, this is because vim will use the first Python it can find which in our case the homebrew-provided one. You can of course get a pre-compiled version and ignore this. But I like to use the latest version of vim and with the 7.4 beta, I have been doing that a lot lately…

So, what is one to do? We have to fix the PATH. Here is the script that I use to recompile vim. This goes in the root of the vim project.

export PATH=/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/bin

./configure \
        --enable-perlinterp \
        --enable-pythoninterp \
        --enable-rubyinterp \
        --enable-cscope \
        --with-features=huge

make

There and vim is now compiled properly with Python support that won’t make you cry.

Thanks to Steve Losh for pointing me in the right direction on this.