Monday, July 25, 2016

Re: Changing the defaults with Vim 8

Ideally, starting the program as 'vim' would automatically give the user the improvements promised in the name. And 'vi' would hide all those improvements.

Here is my list of options to set when run as 'vim':

set nocompatible

Just because.

set autoindent

It's smart enough to cover most basic needs.

set backspace=indent,eol,start

Because the default behavior weirds out new users.

set hidden

Because 'nohidden' is too inflexible and 'hidden' would prevent new users from using tab pages as file proxies.

set ruler

Minimal information.

set wildmenu

Makes command-line completion incredibly useful.

syntax on

Syntax highlighting has been an expectation for a long time.

I'm partial to 'filetype plugin indent on' too but it *may* do a bit too much for some users. 'filetype on' (automatic with 'syntax on' is a good start, though.

Some common issues:

- Indentation settings are too complex. Autodetection should be a built-in feature.
- When switching buffers/windows, the cursor position should be more predictable by default, adding vimscript to one's 'vimrc' shouldn't be needed for that.
- '$MYRUNTIME' would be a very useful addition.

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