dwiw2015.vim — Vim Do What I Want

Sensible Defaults For A Modern Text Editor

2017/4/23 Update: Now that Vim 8 is out, a number of improvements that this distribution makes no longer make sense (thanks to better defaults and built-in plugin suport). It is unlikely future development will go into dwiw2015.vim, outside of re-working it into a brand new distribution built for Vim 8.

Building on top of Tim Pope's sensible.vim, vim-dwiw is a minimal Vim distribution that sets up Vim with the behavior and features that you would expect from a modern text editor.

Benefits at a glance:

• One-step install for Windows, Linux, and OS X
• No cruft in your .vimrc, since default settings are cleanly segregated into a plug-in
• Modern plug-in management with Vundle
• Includes a small curated set of plug-ins to provide modern text editor functionality
• Optimized for both Terminal and GUI Vim

Vim-dwiw is well suited for new Vim users. It smoothes out the roughest of edges of Vim (the stuff that no longer makes sense today), but in a way that doesn't try to change or go far beyond the core Vim behavior.

And for experienced users, vim-dwiw cuts out the boilerplate code that you and everyone else puts in their .vimrc, making it that much easier to get Vim configured on a new machine.

Installation

Linux, OS X, and Friends

One command will get you going:

curl -sS https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mkropat/vim-dwiw2015/master/bootstrap.sh | sh

It should be safe to run — even on an existing Vim set up. See the bootstrap script source for details.

Windows

Assuming you have Chocolatey installed, open a command prompt and run:

cinst vim-dwiw2015

It should be safe to run — even on an existing Vim set up. See the bootstrap script source for details.

Alternatively, you can download the bootstrap script and run it manually from the PowerShell console:

& .\bootstrap.ps1

Plug-in Only

If you already have Vundle set up and the plug-ins you want installed, you can include just the dwiw2015.vim plug-in by adding the following lines to your .vimrc:

Plugin 'tpope/vim-sensible'
Plugin 'mkropat/vim-dwiw2015'

(dwiw2015.vim pairs best with vim-sensible)

And then run the following from Vim:

:PluginInstall

Updating

If you've already installed vim-dwiw, you can update the dwiw2015.vim plug-in and all other installed plugins to the latest version by running the following from Vim:

:PluginUpdate

Default Settings

The authoritative source for the provided default settings is the (well-documented) source file itself.

New Key Shortcuts

Vim-dwiw adds in the most ubiquitous editor shortcuts, and makes some old key mappings act a little more modern.

All Modes

Normal / Visual Mode

Normal Mode Only

Visual Mode Only

Insert Mode

Overriding the Defaults

Add your custom settings to .vimrc after the hook line source … dwiw-loader.vim. The dwiw-loader.vim script pre-loads both the dwiw2015.vim and sensible.vim plugins, allowing you to set custom overrides in your .vimrc.

Modern Features

Vim-dwiw ships with a number of plug-ins out-of-the-box:

• ag.vim — like grep, but better
• ctrlp.vim — fuzzy file, buffer, mru, tag, etc finder
• vim-airline — lean & mean status/tabline for Vim that's light as air
• vim-commentary — comment and un-comment lines easily
• vim-sensible — defaults everyone can agree on
• vim-sleuth — heuristically set buffer options
• Vundle — the plug-in manager for Vim

Plug-in Management

Install packages straight from Vim at any time with Vundle. For example, to install Tim Pope's fantastic Git wrapper, available on Github at tpope/vim-fugitive, simply add the following line to your .vimrc:

Plugin 'tpope/vim-fugitive'

Then run :PluginInstall.

To update all installed plugins to the latest version, run :PluginUpdate.

Fuzzy-Filename Open

Vim's built-in file opener and swtiching (see :help :e and :help :b) works fine, but for truly fast file-switching you need a fuzzy-file opener, like the ctrlp plug-in. Pressing Ctrl-P in normal mode activates the the plug-in. Once activated, start typing any part of the filename you're interested (partial/paths work too) and press Enter to open the file.

Find In Files

Vim already provides an interface to the grep command with :grep, however the grep command is less than ideal for searching most directories, because it automatically searches inside lots of irrelevant filetypes (like compiled files, version control internals, etc.).

A better alternative is The Silver Searcher a.k.a. ag. Using the ack.vim plug-in (configured for ag), you can search straight from Vim with the command :Ack <search terms>.

Note: before ag.vim can be used, the The Silver Searcher must be installed. Fortunately, packages exist for all the major platforms (called perhaps silversearcher-ag or the_silver_searcher) and it's installed automatically for you on Windows by Chocolatey!

Informative Statusline

Vim-dwiw includes the vim-airline plug-in, which packs a whole lot of information into your status while looking great at the same time.

Toggle Line Commenting With a Single Keypress

(Terminal Only) Press Ctrl-/ to comment out the current line (or un-comment it, if it's currently commented out). Select multiple lines in Visual mode and press Ctrl-/ to comment them all out.

(All Versions) Or more powerfully, use Vim motions with gc to comment out any sized block of code:

• gcap — comment out the current paragraph
• gcG — comment out the rest of the file
• etc.

Auto-Detection of Indent Settings

We all have our preferred idea of how far to indent and when to use tabs vs spaces, but when editing a file created by someone else, the important thing is to stay consistent with their indent settings. The sleuth.vim plug-in inspects newly opened files and sets the relevant settings (shiftwidth and expandtab) automatically.

Troubleshooting

Slow Scrolling

If you experience slow scrolling in :list mode in a file with long lines, the issue may be a result of the font in use misisng certain characters. As a workaround, you can set the following in your .vimrc to display ascii characters (which are present in any font):

set listchars=tab:>\ ,trail:-,extends:>,precedes:<,nbsp:+

Inspiration

I may be proficient at editing with Vim, but I'm a novice when it comes to Vim customization. Without reading other people's .vimrc files and plug-in source code, I'd have gotten nowhere. Particular shout-outs go to:

• Tim Pope's vim-sensible and vimrc
• Gary Bernhardt's vimrc
• Steve Losh's Learn Vimscript the Hard Way, Vim blog post and vimrc
• Bailey Ling's vimrc
• Steve Francia's everything and the kitchen sink Vim distribution

License

Copyright © Michael Kropat. Distributed under the same terms as Vim itself. See :help license.