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Comment by gorjusborg | Hacker News Reader

> The point is Vim is a fixed function editor until you start loading it up like a xmas tree.

Exactly, just because you can doesn't mean you need to, or should.

My .vimrc:

  set nocompatible
  set backspace=2
  set noexpandtab copyindent preserveindent softtabstop=0 tabstop=4 shiftwidth=4
  set ruler
  colorscheme torte

Vim is what I mainly use out of habbit. It only requires typing vim as opposed to nvim.

Neovim's init file has this plus more stuff to turn off features like showmode, keybinding for nohlsearch, SQL autocomplete and space indentation for python. Maybe some of those annoying defaults are set up by one of the plugins. It's loaded with up with three plugins: lightline, vim-polyglot and vim-visual-multi which I forgot how to use and wonder why it was loaded in the first place. Polyglot is loaded because I needed syntax highlighting for some more exotic language like Crystal, D, Dart or TOML. Apart from that it uses the monokai-tasty colorscheme. So basically this is my setup. If I open anything in vim that doesn't have syntax highlighting and I find it annoying, I would just close the file and open it in nvim instead. I think Polyglot also helps with Racket.

I've also tried helix and kakoune but find the popup menus quite annoying. Also not being able to set the indent width in helix except on a language basis is a total turn off.

>Vim is what I mainly use out of habbit. It only requires typing vim as opposed to nvim.

I got used to typing vi instead. It's shorter

    alias vi=vim

becomes

    alias vi=nvim

It also works on fresh linux installs without the "damn I forgot to install vim" moment.

On a Debian(-based) system, you can play with update-alternatives

https://manpages.debian.org/bookworm/dpkg/update-alternative...

I just want vim to be aliased to it though, since if I type vi I want something very light and quick (my nvim is bloated ;)

While we're at sharing neat vim configs, here's the one I was quite happy with at the time: I got tired of indent style arguments. I don't care. So I wrote a little heuristic to detect indent style, then configured vim with my preferences, and added this to .vimrc:

> map <F5> <Esc> :perl use Text::FindIndent;VIM::DoCommand($_) for Text::FindIndent->to_vim_commands(join "\n", $curbuf->Get(1..$curbuf->Count()));<CR>

Text::FindIndent is the aforementioned heuristic as a Perl module. Sorry for the mangled quote, original at https://metacpan.org/pod/Text::FindIndent

When I work on existing code, I hit F5 and work within the author's preferences.

My .exrc file is < 10 lines and that + ctags is enough for me to use vim for daily development across multiple languages.

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