How do I know the patch version of my vim?

Question

I have vim 7.4 installed, but I'm not sure what patch level it was at when I installed it. How do I check?

vim --version

Gives

VIM - Vi IMproved 7.4 (2013 Aug 10, compiled Oct 15 2014 16:18:44)
....

But it doesn't give the patch level or a minor version number.

Answer 1

You seem to simply have an unpatched version of vim, otherwise the :version command or the --version parameter would list the patches on the second line. For example on my machine it says:

VIM - Vi IMproved 7.4 (2013 Aug 10, compiled Sep 10 2014 09:36:33)
Included patches: 1-207, 209-355, 357-430

This is "patchlevel" 430, but it skips patches 208 & 356.

Vim doesn't have a "minor version number" beyond major.minor; although I believe that some distributions may use the "patchlevel" as such.

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As shown above, not all patches may be included, so if you want to use this value you can't just check if a number is higher than a certain version.

Usually, the best way is to use has("patch-7.4-399"); this will return true if:

• We're running Vim 7.4 with patch 399 included.
• We're running Vim 7.5 or later.

You can also use the form of has('patch399'), which is typically used like:

if v:version == 704 && has('patch399')

But be aware; this will be false for Vim 7.5; use this only in very specific cases.

See :help feature-list for some more information.

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I can't find a way to list all the included patches, other than redirecting :version and parsing that ... I'm also not sure how this would be useful anyway, as has() should be enough :-)