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Comment by JNRowe | Hacker News Reader

While the information in there is good, a bunch of the settings are now redundant¹. The ones that jumped out to me were esckeys, ruler and showcmd.

Not that I'm saying you can't — or shouldn't — re-set options, just that the linked documentation is a little dated. FWIW, I personally re-set a couple of default options mostly so that I have a point of reference for how an option works when I'm digging about in my config.

I'm of the opinion that the combination of recent vim and Tim Pope's sensible.vim² is The Minimal Setup™.

¹ The site says the last update was 2014, and back then $VIMRUNTIME/defaults.vim wasn't a thing for example(7.4.2111).

² https://github.com/tpope/vim-sensible

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defaults.vim was and still is an abject idea that we sadly can't get rid off, now that it has been there for a few years.

The least desirable property of defaults.vim is also present in sensible or in system-wide vimrcs written by package maintainers: you get a black box where things are added/changed/removed without your knowledge or consent. "Your" so-called minimal setup is going to evolve over time, but not according to "your" needs.

We got so many support request related to that silly mechanism that's not even funny.

Same here. Vim's new "default" to tie middle-click paste to vim's buffer rather than the X selection drives me up the wall, every time. It's not just that I have multiple machines to administer, it's that there's multiple users (roles) to configure separate things. And for every user my default workflow is now broken.

I've given up on vim. I'm now teaching myself Emacs on my own machine, and replace vim with neovim everywhere I can.

Every time I use vim on server that doesn't have my .vimrc file that I copy around I inevitably end up googleing "disable mouse in vim"

:set mouse=''

Looks like you should look it up, too.

I took a second to see who the "we" is in your last sentence. The site vimways.org is unusable because its certificate has expired.

Also, amen. Having used vi since before vim, I actually have a few settings to restore vi features and quirks that I like ( cpoptions+=vxZ!$- ).

Yeah, I know about the certificate issue but the person who can fix that appears to be unreachable. I hope it will be settled soon.

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