Remove vim before installing vim-gnome?

Question

Should I remove vim before installing vim-gnome? It seems redundant to leave vim there, but I'm afraid to remove it. (I'm very new to Ubuntu.)

Answer 1

Should you? No, it doesn't make much of a difference. It's only ~2MB either way, so it's up to you.

Answer 2

You can have as many flavours of vim installed in you system like vim-basic(provided by default), vim-tiny, vim-gnome etc.

You can then choose which binary to use by giving preference of one over another using update-alternatives. update-alternatives decides which binary to execute depending on your preference when vim is used.

Basically the vim binary (/usr/bin/vim) is a symbolic link to /etc/alternatives/vim, which in turn is a symbolic link to your preferred one (e.g. /usr/bin/vim.tiny or /usr/bin/vim.basic). You can read this to get more idea on this.

So you can install as many flavours of vim you want, you just need to choose the one you want to execute by using the preference.