Preferences for Vim

2013-09-23 by terryoy, in tricks

These are settings that to improve usage of VI text editor for various purposes.

1. Whitespaces and indent

Copy & paste below lines to ~/.vimrc:

set smartindent
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set expandtab
set number
  1. smartindent - Do smart autoindenting when starting a new line for C-like programs.
  2. tabstop - Number of spaces that a in the file counts for.
  3. shiftwidth - Number of spaces to use for each step of (auto)indent.
  4. expandtab - Spaces are used in indents with .
  5. number(nu) - Show line number

2. Color scheme

For color scheme preferences:

colorscheme torte

It is the default black/white scheme.

3. Markdown syntax support

For markdown syntax highlight, by default it supports only the “.markdown” extension but not “.md”.

You can try this in VIM and get the correct syntax highlight:

:set syntax=markdown

So if you want it to support the “.md” file also, add this line to the ~/.vimrc:

au BufNewFile,BufFilePre,BufRead *.md set filetype=markdown

4. All kinds of tricks here

4.1 Set fixed width to 80 columns, and soft wrap text automatically

:set columns=80

4.2 Set preference according to File Type

The file type plugin for Vim can help you set preferences for a specific file type.

# Show detected file type
:echo &ft

# List Vim's file types and syntax definitions
:echo glob($VIMRUNTIME . '/ftplugin/*.vim')
:echo glob($VIMRUNTIME . '/syntax/*.vim')

# Check file type plugin status
:filetype

If the file type detection is wrong or not recognized, you can set the file type:

:set filetype=html

Now if you want to add customize settings according to file type, you can edit a file under ~/.vim/ftplugin/<filetype>.vim where <filetype> should be replace by the defined file type. For example:

$ vi ~/.vim/ftplugin/html.vim
set ts=2
set sw=2
set expandtab

Tags: linux, vim