Hello!
Great to hear that you find Vifm useful.
If you use "sudo apt-get install vifm" that will be installed 0.7.8 version. (Why not 0.8??)
0.8 wasn't packaged for Debian and even if it were it probably wouldn't make it into Ubuntu that fast (Ubuntu uses Debian packages and it takes time and efforts of package maintainer to update it there).
And if you try to install 0.8 version from sources that you will see: "configure: error: libncursesw not found"
Maybe I missed something?
You need to install development version of libncursesw in order to build applications that use it from sources.
As noted in the INSTALL file, corresponding package is called libncursesw5-dev, so doing
sudo apt-get install libncursesw5-dev
before the build should fix the issue for you.