Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Make Vim Your Own

We’ve been working with stock Vim pretty much as it runs out of the box. The factory settings have served as a useful baseline, giving us a common feature set to work with, but I don’t mean to suggest that you stick with them. Vim has some unfortunate default settings. If you want to know why something behaves a certain way, the answer often seems to be, “Because that’s how vi did it!”

But you don’t need to put up with those defaults. You can customize Vim to make it behave the way you want. If you save your preferences in a vimrc file, you can make it so that Vim is always configured in a way that suits your workflow. Appendix 1, ​Customize Vim to Suit Your Preferences​, provides a basic primer to get you started.