This is a card in Dave's Virtual Box of Cards.

My Minimal .vimrc

Created: 2024-12-01

My "real" .vimrc is longer than this because it has my vviki stuff and a bunch of project-specific things.

But I also have this minimal set of preferences for things like remote servers where I just want consistent behavior.

Sorry if not all of this is commented, I’m just dumping my actual file contents here:

" Tab is really 4 spaces. See :help tabstop
set softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 expandtab
set laststatus=2
set statusline=%f\ %y%=Line:%l/%L\ Col:%03c
set hlsearch
set cursorline
set mouse=
set pastetoggle=<F12>
set backspace=indent,start
syntax on
colorscheme desert
" Make matching nested element not look like cursor
hi MatchParen cterm=bold ctermbg=none ctermfg=magenta
" Don't auto-indent HTML - it's awful!!!!
au FileType html setlocal indentexpr=
" Use arrow keys to cycle through buffers
nnoremap <silent> <right> :bnext<cr>
nnoremap <silent> <left> :bprev<cr>
" Ctrl+A replays whatever macro I've recorded as "a"
nnoremap <C-a> @a

Note that some of the above is the default behavior for Vim as packaged by some distro package repositories. These are all the settings I "need" across Vim as packaged by Slackware Linux, Arch Linux, Alpine Linux, and OpenBSD.