How are the packages vim-gtk and vim-gnome different from each other? I've tried both and the resulting Gvim feels the same (to me). If there is no difference, why are both packages maintained?
Difference Between vim-gtk and vim-gnome Explained
gnomegtkgvim
Related Solutions
GTK and Qt are user interface toolkits and frameworks. GTK is the standard toolkit for GNOME/Ubuntu while Qt is used in KDE/Kubuntu. From the user's point of view I'd say it's just the looks that differ.
If you built vim against Qt rather than GTK+ and python-complete still isn't working, that suggests the problem isn't actually a consequence of trying to link to both GTK+2 and GTK+3.
However, since you haven't yet provided any details about how you built with Qt (Qt isn't officially supported, so you must have used a third party derivative of vim), and you haven't provided any detailed information about what error messages or malfunctions you're having with python-complete, it's not really possible to tell you how to fix the problem and get vim working with Qt.
Fortunately, vim officially supports some GUI's other than GTK+ and Qt, and one such build is officially packaged for Ubuntu.
Just install the Athena version of vim, which is provided by the vim-athena package.
You can install by clicking the package link above, or searching for it in the Software Center or Synaptic Package Manager, or running these commands:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install vim-athena
vim-athena doesn't depend on or use any version of GTK+. If you use sudo apt-get build-dep vim-athena, it probably will install GTK+ and GNOME related libraries, because the vim-athena binary package is built from the same source package as vim and other vim-providing packages. In any case, you shouldn't need to build from source, as the binaries provided by vim-athena are already built against Athena and not against GTK+ or other graphical toolkits.
Related Question
- Qt vs GTK – Differences Between Qt and GTK Programs
- Ubuntu – How to build vim with a gui without gtk
- Ubuntu – Upgrade vim/gvim on Ubuntu 12.04
- Ubuntu – Which vim version can I use
- Ubuntu – How to update GTK+ and/or Gnome on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
- Ubuntu – Repair Vim editor
- Ubuntu – The difference between ‘gnome-software’ and ‘ubuntu-software’
Best Answer
Both packages provide the same application, but compiled with different dependencies (e.g. vim-gnome depends on libgnome2). Vim-gtk is important only to people who use Kubuntu (or some lightweight desktop environment) and don't want to install GNOME libraries. If you use the standard Ubuntu desktop, the dependencies are already present, and you can safely use vim-gnome. I agree that it could be confusing.