Rubenerd

I’d let a lot of cruft accumulate in my vimrc, as I’m sure we all have with software we’ve used for a long time. I’d had replacement configs like this in the back of mind, as well as plugins in light of the latest Vim 8.0 release, but never got around to implementing either.

But then I formatted my Mac laptop, fired up MacVim without my vimrc, and realised how productive I was with the standard config! So while stuck on a plane without WiFi – which was glorious – I decided to go the opposite direction and make as minimal a vimrc as possible.

It’s been a few weeks, and I’m still using it:

set linebreak                "" soft linebreaks on words
set number                   "" line numbers
set ruler                    "" statusbar with mode, cursor position
syntax on                    "" syntax highlighting
set guifont=Inconsolata:h16  "" default font for (mac/g)vim
set expandtab                "" convert evil tabs to nice spaces
set shiftwidth=4             "" indent by 4 spaces
set tabstop=4                "" tighter spacing for tabs
set encoding=utf-8           "" turn vim into a multi-byte editor

Almost half the settings are just for tab spacing. I’ve tried over the years to adapt to how Vim does things out of the box, but I use spaces instead of tabs, like a gentleman.

As for the settings I didn’t add back in, a few were easy wins:

• set nocompatible is redundant; the existence of .vimrc will ensure Vim doesn’t enter vi compatibility mode.

• autocmd BufEnter *.md :setlocal filetype=markdown is now redundant, because Vim 8’s syntax highlighting detects md files as markdown.

• All my abbreviations/snippets live in Alfred now, so I didn’t need all my abbr lines

Update 2019: Added encoding line.