Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Know the Saw, Then Sharpen It

In Bram Moolenaar’s classic essay “Seven Habits of Effective Text Editing,” he advises that you invest time sharpening the saw.^[31] Building your vimrc file is one way to do that, but it’s vital that you understand Vim’s baseline functionality before you build on top of it. First learn to use the saw. Then sharpen it.

I’ve seen people customizing Vim in ways that blunt the saw. I’ve even seen people sharpening the wrong edge! Don’t worry; because you’ve read Practical Vim, you’re not going to make those same mistakes. You already know Vim’s core functionality.

Build your vimrc from scratch. As a starting point, you could use the essential.vim file that’s distributed with this book’s source code. Many Vim users ...