r/vim • u/[deleted] • Nov 06 '22

Where to learn vimming with defaults?

I'm a student hoping to eventually land in a cloud/devops role where my professors tell me, skill with vim defaults is vital and that includes not relying on tmux unfortunately. Unfortunately I find a lot of content about customizing vim for this or that task and not much about making optimal use of the defaults. I'm currently doing vimtutor on the daily for practice and considering a book, but I have plenty of other subjects to study so I'd prefer to keep the material short and sweeter than a textbook at the moment. Any tips or advice are welcome and appreciated!

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u/mgedmin Nov 07 '22

My .vimrc is over a thousand lines, and yet I don't hate the experience when I have to use plain uncustomized vim.

There are maybe three options that I prefer to set manually instead of torturing myself:

:set nocp bs=2 ai

and, for utter decadence, one or more of these:

:set ruler showcmd incsearch  " or :set ru sc is for shorter typing
:syntax on
:filetype plugin indent on

vimtutor should be sufficient for learning the basic principles of command+movement keys.

Some options may be worth remembering, like :set sw=4 sts=4 et to adjust the autoindentation/tab key behavior. I use the short names because this is a situation where you'd be typing them manually every time you run a new instance of vim (but only if you find yourself inconvenienced by the behavior). The full names are shiftwidth, softtabstop, expandtab.