April 13th, 2008 @ 08:45

For a project of mine (involving LEJOS-OSEK, mostly), I’m forced (well, almost) to use Windows, which my dear VirtualBox virtualizes fairly well on my clean Linux host. I obviously setup vim for my coding needs, but its default behavior isn’t quite what we are used to on other platforms. For instance visual mode selection with arrows requires you to hold Shift, while it doesn’t elsewhere and backup files are created upon write.

So, let’s edit the .vimrc file, which actually is at VIM_INSTALL_PATH\_vimrc (for instance C:\Program Files\vim\_vimrc with the default install options).
Disabling backup files is as simple as adding

set nobackup

Getting visual mode arrows selection is a bit different, as explained in vim tip 864 comments, you can either add

set keymodel-=stopsel

around the end of the file
or drop the

behave mswin

line from the default vimrc.

Here are two other (non windows-specific) tips:
Bash like filename completion:

set wildmode=longest:full
set wildmenu

Pythonic smart indent:

autocmd BufRead *.py set ai et ts=4 sw=4 sts=4
autocmd FileType python set ai et ts=4 sw=4 sts=4
autocmd BufRead *.pyx set ai et ts=4 sw=4 sts=4
autocmd BufRead *.py set smartindent cinwords=if,elif,else,for,while,try,except,finally,def,class

See also this pretty Tango color scheme for vim.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 13th, 2008 at 8:45 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.