Question

After compiling vim (I really wanted the breakindent feature, which wasn’t available in vanilla vim for some reason), it won’t display certain characters, like curly quotes or bullet points. Furthermore, it gives me an error for a line that has been commented out in a syntax file: Not an editor command: " Vim Syntax Script. I would have thought it would understand the ” in the beginning of the line as indicative of a comment. I don’t have these issues is the normal vim from the repos.

Answer 1

Your distro likely has other patches applied to vim to make it fit your environment. By compiling it yourself you are missing out on all the work they have done to make it fit your system.

You should probably figure out how to compile using the distro compile system instead of from scratch. Once you can compile the version and patch set from your distros source repository, then you can tweak that process to add your other patch and things should wind up smoother for you.