A. Pagaltzis wrote:
A virginal vim is almost as good as my customised one as far as
I'm concerned: a quick `:set nocp ai nu acd | syn on` and I'm off
to the races. Those are all of the customisations that affect me
constantly, the rest of my vimrc is gravy.
I do like to delete characters with backspace, so I need this:
set backspace=indent,eol,start
There are a few more. I'm sure I can live with a .vimrc fitting into a single
screen though.
I think the worst thing about vim is it's hostility towards newcomers. If you
run it without arguments, it tells you how to get help, but if you run it on a
file, vim assumes you already know what you're doing. So you can't quit. And
you're on Unix, so pressing F1 rarely crosses your mind, and there's no tip
about getting help.
Now comes the critical moment. The newbie is very annoyed, since it's probably
the first encounter with a program that refuses to terminate. The newbie asks a
more experienced user: "Can you please help me quit vim?". There are two common
answers:
* "No. Stay there forever." (common result: ps | grep vim; kill -9 pid; emacs)
* "Type :q. Yes, press Shift and ';' and then 'q'. Yeah, yeah, I know - but look
at the block editing with Ctrl-v!" (common result: the guy asks an emacs user
about block editing, immediately forgets the long sequence of keystrokes and
goes back to vim)
And then there are the people who have a trauma from vi classic.
