How to install YouCompleteMe and vim version 8 on Debian 10 (proxmox), Ubuntu 14, 16 and 18 using vim-plug

YouCompleteMe is a fast, as-you-type, fuzzy-search code completion engine for Vim available from vimawesome.com

There is - for the moment - no Ubuntu package compiled with python which is required by the plugin. The following is a short description on how to install everything.

First, install

sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake python-dev python3-dev libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev

Then install vim from source:

cd /usr/local/src
git clone https://github.com/vim/vim.git
cd vim
./configure --enable-pythoninterp=yes --enable-python3interp=yes  --enable-rubyinterp=yes
make install

On Debian (buster) / proxmox the configure arguments should be

./configure --enable-pythoninterp=yes --enable-python3interp=yes  --enable-rubyinterp=yes --enable-pythoninterp=yes --enable-python3interp=yes --with-python3-config-dir=/usr/lib/python3.7/config-3.7m-x86_64-linux-gnu/

Now you have a vim version with the required components compled in.

Next install the minimalist Vim plugin manager vim-plug

curl -fLo ~/.vim/autoload/plug.vim --create-dirs \
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim

Add all tree sections Example and On-demand loading of plugins and the Post-update hooks from vim-plug for Valloric/YouCompleteMe to your ~/.vimrc.

Start /usr/local/bin/vim and type

:PlugInstall

The package manager will fetch everything and compile it. Your .vim will grow to 450Mb.

If this is a true multiuser system you may want to move ~/.vim/autoload and ~/.vim/plugged to /usr/local/share/vim/vim80/ and create links back to your .vim directory.