Question

My version of non gui Vim seems to use glib.

me@laptop:~$ ldd /usr/bin/vim | grep glib-2.0
        libglib-2.0.so.0 => /lib/libglib-2.0.so.0 (0xb722c000)

But is it possible to build a version of Vim that does not use glib? If so, what is it using for an event loop?

Answer 1

Info from aptitude on Ubuntu’s vim-nox and vim-tiny packages shows that these packages do not depend on glib.

$ aptitude show vim-tiny vim-nox | grep glib; echo $?
1

The source code contains a top-level readme file which mentions some of the event loops used in the code. It sounds like there are a few different event loops used, each in a different mode. They use the function vgetc to get input.