Hi Unraid Community,

I'm new to Unraid after migrating from OpenMediaVault last week. So far I'm really happy with it, except for one thing:

It would be nice to have Vim, as it's my text editor of choice. I use Vim every day at work and would love to use it in my homelab too!

I dug through the forum and Reddit and found ich777/un-get, but I noticed the GitHub repo was archived on April 21st, 2026. Installing packages via /boot/extra seems a bit risky to me.

What are you guys using to get Vim and other packages running?

Thanks in advance and have a great weekend,

Max

Hi Max, welcome to Unraid!

Out of curiosity, and I may be missing something: why do you consider /boot/extra risky? Unraid itself handles that folder (if I'm not mistaken).

For Vim it works fine. Here's the sequence, run as root in the Unraid shell (tested on 7.3.3). File names match the mirror as of today; if curl returns a 404, check the directory listing for the current version.

1. Create the folder and fetch the packages

mkdir -p /boot/extra && cd /boot/extra

curl -LO https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware64-current/slackware64/ap/vim-9.2.1167-x86_64-1.txz

curl -LO https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware64-current/slackware64/l/libsodium-1.0.22-x86_64-2.txz

ls -la /boot/extra

You should see both files, libsodium is the only library Vim needs that Unraid doesn't ship.

2. Install right away

upgradepkg --install-new /boot/extra/libsodium-1.0.22-x86_64-2.txz /boot/extra/vim-9.2.1167-x86_64-1.txz

3. Verify

ldd /usr/bin/vim | grep "not found" || echo "all libraries present"

vim --version | head -2

 echo hello > /tmp/t.txt && vim -es -c '%s/hello/world/' -c wq /tmp/t.txt && cat /tmp/t.txt

Two rules keep this safe: never drop in libraries Unraid already ships, and re-check the packages after each Unraid upgrade since the base follows slackware-current.

Have a good weekend!

Edited 2 hours ago2 hr by UnraidSecretaryOffice