“Better” Settings

It’s hard to come up with category names for different groups of options, maps, functions, etc… in the vimrc file. There are a number of options in Vim whose default setting doesn’t quite work for me so they gotta change…

" Set the search scan to wrap around the file

set wrapscan

" Set the forward slash to be the slash of note. Backslashes suck

" This is really only applicable to Windows but I like to have a vimrc

" that works no matter what OS I'm currently on

set shellslash

" Make command line two lines high

set ch=2

" set visual bell -- I hate that damned beeping

set vb

" Allow backspacing over indent, eol, and the start of an insert

set backspace=2

" See :help 'cpoptions' for these ones. 'cpoptions' has a huge

" set of possible options

set cpoptions=ces$

" Set the status line the way I like it

set stl=%f\ %m\ %r\ Line:\ %l/%L[%p%%]\ Col:\ %c\ Buf:\ #%n\ [%b][0x%B]

" tell Vim to always put a status line in, even if there is only one

" window

set laststatus=2

" Hide the mouse pointer while typing

set mousehide

" The GUI (i.e. the 'g' in 'gvim') is fantastic, but let's not be

" silly about it :) The GUI is fantastic, but it's fantastic for

" its fonts and its colours, not for its toolbar and its menus -

" those just steal screen real estate

set guioptions=ac

" This is the timeout used while waiting for user input on a

" multi-keyed macro or while just sitting and waiting for another

" key to be pressed measured in milliseconds.

"

" i.e. for the ",d" command, there is a "timeoutlen" wait

" period between the "," key and the "d" key. If the

" "d" key isn't pressed before the timeout expires,

" one of two things happens: The "," command is executed

" if there is one (which there isn't) or the command aborts.

"

" The idea here is that if you have two commands, say ",dv" and

" ",d" that it will take 'timeoutlen' milliseconds to recognize

" that you're going for ",d" instead of ",dv"

"

" In general you should endeavour to avoid that type of

" situation because waiting 'timeoutlen' milliseconds is

" like an eternity.

set timeoutlen=500

" Keep some stuff in the history

set history=100

" These commands open folds

set foldopen=block,insert,jump,mark,percent,quickfix,search,tag,undo

" When the page starts to scroll, keep the cursor 8 lines from

" the top and 8 lines from the bottom

set scrolloff=8

" Allow the cursor to go in to "invalid" places

set virtualedit=all

" For how *I* code these are the best types of settings for

" completion but I get rid of some neat things that you might

" like

set complete=.,w,b,t

" Incrementally match the search. I orignally hated this

" but someone forced me to live with it for a while and told

" me that I would grow to love it after getting used to it...

" turns out he was right :)

set incsearch

" Syntax coloring lines that are too long just slows down the world

set synmaxcol=2048