Recipe 6.12. Customizing Vim

6.12.1 Problem

All this customization is great, but it goes away when you quit. You don't want to re-type all your abbreviations and mappings each time you start. How do you customize your Vim environment, and preserve your abbreviations and custom keymappings?

6.12.2 Solution

Create a ~/.vimrc file with your desired options. You can create one from scratch, or copy and modify the global /etc/vim/vimrc file.

What can you put in your ~/.vimrc? Any Vim option that you want. And what might those options be? You can list all option names by typing:

:set all

   aleph=224

noarabic

   arabicshape

noallowrevins

noaltkeymap

...

Then look up what they mean:

:help noaltkeymap

This opens the hyperlinked options help page:

:help options

As you can see, a person could happily spend a lifetime fine-tuning Vim (and, with luck, completely avoid doing any real work).

6.12.3 Discussion

When you read the Vim documentation, it's easy to become overwhelmed by its flexibility, and the sheer number of possible options. Start with the basics, as illustrated here, and don't worry about the super-duper geeky stuff until you're sure you actually need it. There comes a point where plain old typing does the job just fine.

This sample ~/.vimrc demonstrates three fundamental Vim features: customizing startup options, abbreviations, and keymaps. Quotation marks are used to comment out lines.

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

"   Carla's  vimrc, created 4/22/2004   "

"             Vim options               "

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

" Turn off vi compatibility, to get all of Vim's features

set nocompatible

" Tabs use 4 spaces

set tabstop=4

" more powerful backspacing

set backspace=indent,eol,start

" Syntax highlighting on by default

syntax on

" auto-detect filetypes for syntax highlighting

filetype plugin indent on

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

"             Abbreviations             "

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

:ab Qu Carla Has Gone Fishing, Back Much Later

:ab Co Copyright (c) 2004 Carla Schroder all rights reserved

:ab Em carla@bratgrrl.com

:ab Wb http://tuxcomputing.com

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

"   HTML tag mappings, for Insert mode   "

"""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

:map! ,ah <A href="">

:map! ,a </A>

:map! ,b <B><Esc>ea</B><Esc>a

:map! ,i <I><Esc>ea</I><Esc>a

:map! ,l <LI><Esc>ea</LI><Esc>a

Any changes made to ~/.vimrc take effect the next time you open Vim.

6.12.4 See Also

• vim(1)

• Vim's online help (:help vimrc, :help usr_05.txt, :help ab)

• Chapter 11 of Learning the vi Editor

• Chapter 8 of Vi IMproved—Vim