A morning of building

I am a university student.
And my computer department's software policy is terrible.
For one, their VIM was not compiled with GNU support.
So you are stuck with a fairly awkward terminal VIM.
I mean, of course, VIM is supposed to be all keyboard-rocking and everything but...
...isn't is nice to sometimes just grab those code lines with a mouse select?
Anyways, I set out on a quest for getting gVIM working on my account.
Certainly, I do not have sudo permissions, so I had to get the source.
Ok, now what? I have never built anything outside of an IDE before.
make?, was it?
Alright,

cd vim73/src
make
#big, scary, make log here
./vim -g

Awesome!
But as soon as I try to turn on syntax highlighting, I notice that everything is not this great.
I do not have write access to the /usr/bin.
After a few minutes of searching I ended up doing this:

./configure --prefix=$HOME/vim/
make install
#bigger, scarier, make install log here
cd ~/vim/bin/vim -g

Essentially, you tell make install to install everything in the prefix directory.
$HOME is the home directory environmental variable of course.
To be cool, I have also edited by shell startup file (.bash_profile for bash).

alias vim='$HOME/vim/bin/vim'
alias gvim='$HOME/vim/bin/vim -g'

Let the magic begin!