[GTALUG] Share your ~/.vimrc file (was Vim talk slides posted)

[Anthony de Boer]

Christopher Browne wrote:
>  Myles Braithwaite <me at mylesbraithwaite.com> wrote:
> > I'm really interested in other people's setup so could we start a
> > thread of people sharing their ~/.vimrc file.
> > ...
> I am mostly an Emacs user, and have quite a lot of stuff in
> $HOME/.emacs.d/init.el

I've noticed over the years that it's mostly been the programmers who
are able to do most if not all their work on one system who are able
to customize it to the Nth degree.  This was even more so back in the
day when an attempt to compile GNU Emacs was something people launched
over a weekend.

Sysadmins and support people usually didn't get the luxury of staying
inside their own personalized environment.

Ed and vi were what you got on a Unix system in the SysV era; the latter
was usually easier to use.  Emacs wasn't an easy choice to make until
the Linux binary-package era and by then I was too used to vi.

(FWIW, I'd first met Emacs on a PR1ME system several years before I met
vi, but it was a demo copy we couldn't afford to buy.)

I've mostly been doing work that involved logging into a default
environment on larger pools of machines over the years (starting back
when the better modems were 2400 baud!) and being able to get work done
without tweaking the environment first was more of a priority.  Dealing
with quirks like having to set TERM first, or someone else had picked C
Shell or EDITOR=jove as overridden defaults, or Sun putting /opt/wtf/bbq
in PATH ahead of saner versions of random tools, or RedHat aliasing
common commands to their --with-training-wheels versions, well, after
awhile you learn what not to step in.

That probably went on a bit long, but the point I was getting at was not
forgetting how to drive a default environment.

> The vim config file I didn't realize was there and had interesting contents
> was $HOME/.viminfo,
> which seems to have some fascinating history about what things I have
> edited using vim over
> the last several years.  If you use vim a lot, I'll bet you'll find neat
> stuff in .viminfo!

Or someone doing forensics on you can glean interesting data from that
file.  Having said that, maybe .bash_history is another file you should
glance into...

-- 
Anthony de Boer