ego.istic.org

People who follow my occasional Vim notes here or who are wondering how to get started with Vim might like to know that the git repository of my Vim configuration is now available via gitweb. It was written for my use only and is not intended as a template, and might even be confusing to novice users in places, but if you are stuck for ideas of what to configure it might get you started, so I have opened it up. Of course, I recommend that you fetch the repository by doing

git-clone git://git.istic.org/vimrc.git

because then you have your own repository of it and can keep it version-controlled and synchronised between machines you use, which saves a lot of faffing about. If you don't have git, or just want to fetch it one-off, feel free to browse the revision history on gitweb by following the link above; gitweb will even let you download a snapshot of any revision in various archive formats.

The way I use the repo is to clone it into a directory ~/.vim and have my ~/.vimrc (which is not under version control) just contain

source ~/.vim/vimrc

Of particular note is the list of local additions to the spelling dictionary, which is something of a mixture. Technical terms you may remember from previous blog articles are juxtaposed with sf futuronyms (see, I just wrote another one) and words the OED marks as “Inf.” (for informal, a polite way of calling them slang). These sit alongside proper nouns of places, people, and characters from fiction I am writing, and some local terms (such as my CRSid, dh286, and CRSid itself).

I don't think my Vim configuration is particularly hefty, not compared to some I have seen, yet when my boss saw the repo this afternoon his reaction was, “When you said you were a Vim user, I didn't realise it was quite this bad.”