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Comment by klochner | Hacker News Reader

I recently switched to vim (macvim), and one thing bugs me that maybe someone knows a fix for . . .

The padding between the left edge of the window (or the right edge of the line numbers) and the interior text it ~0. I'd like just a little padding.

anyone?

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You can make use of the foldcolumn. The fold column is an optionally visible column that can be put between line numbers and text. It is generally used to show markers to indicate level of folding, if any. If you want to use it to create separation between line numbers and text, but don't want to see the folding markers, just set the foreground color of the fold column to be same as the background color. So something like this:

:set foldcolumn=3 (or 4 or 5 or what4ever. . . )

:hi FoldColumn guifg=black guibg=black

That should do it.

That helps if you don't have numbers, but I'm getting the padding left of my line numbers.

Is there a way to swap the foldcolumn to the left of line numbers?

Very sorry, my mistake. I thought I had checked and confirm that it did appear to the right and I must have looked too quickly. No, I don't think there is a way to swap those columns. (At least not through Vim 7.2, Vim 7.3 introduced relative line numbering and maybe it has a teak in addition to that -- but I doubt it.) It's not too hard to adjust line indenting so it defaults to minimum that is greater than 1, say 2 or 3, but that would be sort of an ugly hack, inserting blank spaces into your document for mere purpose of viewing more space between line column and text.

  :help numberwidth

Ah, I was too quick to reply. Sorry.

I do not know if it's possible to do what you want. I find that a slight variation in background color (:highlight LineNr) helps in distinguishing the numbers from the content.

It may be macvim specific, vim doesn't look as bad. I can distinguish text from line numbers, but it bugs me that they touch.

I posted to superuser with an image to give you an idea of what I'm talking about:

http://superuser.com/questions/205553/how-can-i-add-some-pad...

It's the same in terminal vim. A fix could be to change the background of the linenumbering to something less obtrusive.

Example: http://tinypic.com/r/f0u84/7

great idea, worked like a charm. Thanks.

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