Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Use Vim’s Factory Settings

Vim is highly configurable. If you don’t like the defaults, then you can change them. That’s a good thing, but it could cause confusion if you follow the examples in this book using a customized version of Vim. You may find that some things don’t work for you the way that they are described in the text. If you suspect that your customizations are causing interference, here’s a quick test. Try quitting Vim and then launching it with these options:

$ vim -u NONE -N

The -u NONE flag tells Vim not to source your vimrc on startup. That way, your customizations won’t be applied and plugins will be disabled. In older versions of Vim, not loading a vimrc file activates vi compatible mode, which causes many useful features ...