I’m starting to learn about creating my own .vimrc file and I keep noticing features that are missing with my custom version that were present in the default setup.
I was wondering if it is possible to view the default settings, so I can compare them to my own and look up all the standard inclusions I don't know to learn more about them.
I searched and couldn’t find an answer online, and if the reason why there isn’t one is that the answer to this question is glaringly obvious, I’m really sorry; I’m still a bit of a noob :p
No worries, it’s a perfectly valid question. Unfortunately, the answer is a bit complicated. First of all, Vim has certain defaults that are documented in the built-in help system.
Some of them are only used when Vi compatibility mode is disabled, and that’s the first customisation most people make:
:set nocompatible
On top of that, many distributions provide their own custom config, for example Debian/Ubuntu comes with /etc/vim/vimrc. To makes things even more confusing, Vim 8 comes with a sane configuration (called default.vim) that only gets applied when ~/.vimrc is not found. Not to mention that NeoVim comes with its own set of defaults.
In practice, I suggest to explicitly set any options you care about to make sure your config is portable between systems and versions of Vim. To see the current value of a given option, use a question mark:
:set showcmd?
To learn more about a given option (including the default value), use Vim’s comprehensive help system:
:help showcmd
Finally, you might want to check my annotated .vimrc for some inspiration, and there is also the vim-sensible plugin that provides some sane defaults most people would agree to.
The easiest way to see “vanilla” Vim options is to start it using:
$ vim -u NONE -N
It will start Vim without any of your customizations or plugins, but still in ‘nocompatible’ mode (i.e., basically, running full-fledged Vim, instead of its stripped down version emulating Vi).
Then, you can execute the following commands:
:set all
:map
:command
:let
:function
:autocmd
to see all options, mappings, commands, variables, functions, and auto-commands, respectively, that are currently in effect. (I cannot promise I haven’t forgotten a customization category.)
Vim also comes with a bunch of basic configurations that is skipped by the -u NONE option, that you can also include while still excluding your .vimrc, by using -u NORC, instead.
Based on #Amadan's answer, I came up with this file (ShowAllDefaults.vim) and command to run it and capture the output.
. In the mean time, learning that, if you have files under ~/.vim, they get executed if you use this:
vim -u ShowAllDefaults.vim -N +q
So the correct way to do it is:
vim -u NONE -N +"source ShowAllDefaults.vim" +q
Contents of ShowAllDefaults.vim:
set verbosefile=/tmp/ShowAllDefaults.log
set all
map
command
let
function
autocmd
I am trying after long time to get familiar with vim also, and I came across this because I had same question.
How I found answer from within vim was to pull up help on defaults and it explained to get defaults along with .vimrc for newer users and also gave the path to default script so you could open it right up in your editor and read & compare it.
I am not going to give my exact path because that might change in different versions, so best to get it from help documents inside vim.
Related
Some irritating issue when doing git commit (for example, there are other non-git scenarios): what I'd like to type (really fast):
git commit -a --amendEnter:wqEntergit push -fEnter
My problem is that after :wqEnter I have to wait until vim exits, and as I have a big vimrc it takes some time. I know, I'm spoiled.
I'm pretty sure there is a flag to git commit that will not open vim at all, but I'd prefer a more generic vim solution that will make vim not eat my input.
My vimrc is here
Git
While the OP wants a vim-centric solution, I offer these git workarounds as
temporary band-aids (and useful information).
At the bottom, I provide resources for discovering the issue in vim.
no-edit flag
Amending with the --no-edit flag causes vim not to launch (which is a good
idea if you do not need to edit the commit message: this is what the flag is
designed for).
Use a "different" editor for commit messages
There are a couple of different configuration options here, and a couple of
different "vims" to try.
See also git(1), section ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES, variable GIT_EDITOR.
One-off configuration
This is good for occasional usage (you can alias it, of course).
Use the -c flag on git:
git -c core.editor='vim variant' commit...
You could also set GIT_EDITOR via your shell (e.g., env, export, or
bash-isms).
Permanent configuration
This is good if you cannot resolve the vim issue and need it permanently.
Edit your configuration file (e.g., git config --edit --global), and add
[core]
editor = vim variant
Vim variants
Vim's command line switches let us control various aspects of its behavior. You
might want to
disable plugins (--noplugin)
disable a vimrc (-u NORC)
disable both (-u NONE)
use a 'clean' vim (--clean)
use a completely different vimrc for git (-u DEFAULTS or -u ~/.mygitvimrc)
The vimrc option allows us to craft an extremely efficient and minimal vimrc for
git work, while keeping our original for full-time stuff.
Experimentation may show that -N (not compatible mode) is necessary with some
of these.
Once you've chosen a setup that works, simply use vim <args>... as your git
editor, in one of the spots above.
Vim
The first things to try on the vim side are binary-split debugging your
vimrc and profiling your
vimrc to
find out what the root cause is.
It helps to be comfortable debugging for these steps. If you need to debug
vimscript, see :help debug-scripts.
Once you've identified the root cause, the next step is to squash it. You may
need to
disable a plugin (possibly to be loaded on demand)
change an autocommand to not be so nasty (look especially for autocommands
that are accidentally triggered more than once such as those not in
augroup)
avoid expensive function calls in your vimrc
help convert a heavy plugin to autoloads
or a myriad of other performance-enhancing techniques.
As always, the key is to know where the problem lies first.
For OP, using pathogen and vundle together seems like a mistake (two different runtimepath/plugin managers?). Also, vundle provides vundle#begin as a possible time-saver over vundle#rc.
I uninstalled vim74 and compiled vim81 and installed it. However I found it strange, comparing to vim74. When there's no .vimrc file under HOME dir, I open a c++ file and syntax highlight is working and I can use Backspace to delete letters. However when I add a .vimrc under HOME dir and just put set number into it, when the c++ source file is opened, no highlight, and Backspace not working. Why is that ? I used to add some configurations in .vimrc under vim74 before, and this situation never happens.
After complaints that Vim in its default configuration is hard to use (especially for beginners), it was decided to enable a default configuration if the user hasn't created his own ~/.vimrc (yet). This was introduced with Vim 8.0, and explains what you're seeing (namely: syntax highlighting and sensible backspace behavior). Read more about the details at :help defaults.vim.
The help also has instructions how to keep the defaults when adding your own ~/.vimrc configuration:
If you create your own .vimrc, it is recommended to add these lines somewhere
near the top:
unlet! skip_defaults_vim
source $VIMRUNTIME/defaults.vim
Then Vim works like before you had a .vimrc.
Tip: Don't go all crazy with adding various snippets (especially not those you don't fully understand) and plugins to your ~/.vimrc, even though the Internet is full of them. Rather, build it up gradually, depending on needs, and back up your understanding with careful studying of the excellent :help. Also, avoid pre-packaged Vim distributions; they're even worse.
I use gvim with julia-vim for editing julia code. I am using julia 0.5 on a mac and installed julia-vim with vundle.
My problem is that files with the .jl extension do not have appropriate highlighting. For example, if is highlighted but for is not. Any solution for this?
.jl files are sometimes recognized as lisp files by default, (blame Sawfish) so that's probably the syntax highlighting you're getting. (type defun and progn and etc and see if the pretty colors pop up)
You were close when you said the correct solution was :set syntax=julia, what you need is to set filetype plus some autocmd magicks to make that happen every time you open a .jl file.
Put something like this in some file (e.g. jl.vim) in your ftdetect directory:
autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile *.jl :set filetype=julia
And that should do it.
Addendum 1: Changing filetype instead of syntax may be required to trigger additional features like the LaTeX expansions depending on the root of your problem, so that's what I am using.
Addendum 2: Note that this should've been handled by the julia-vim plugin, but conflicts with other scripts can mess with that. You can use :scriptnames to see what scripts have been loaded and in what order, and try to debug what could be causing the conflict, if you think that's worth the trouble.
Addendum 3: Also related is that Vundle has some specific configurations that need to be made when it comes to filetypes, so that could also be causing this. However, I've seen this and similar problems happen outside Vundle for any number of reasons so I still believe that the solution at the top is the best one, and will possibly prevent some future headaches.
After testing julia-vim I think the issue is likely with the color scheme you are using.
Try using a different one.
:colorscheme desert
I tried it with the built-in desert and both if and for were highlighted (see below).
I found that the instructions here worked a treat. Namely
git clone https://github.com/JuliaEditorSupport/julia-vim.git
mkdir -p ~/.vim
cp -R julia-vim/* ~/.vim
Note: I realise that the OP claims to have already installed Julia-Vim using Vundle, but I came to this question because Vim was automatically using LISP syntax highlighting for me, and the above was enough for me. So I am sharing in case anyone comes from the same boat as me (i.e. the problem is not Vundle related) :)
I have some specific settings for my latex highlighting and am using the indentLine plugin, which requires let g:indentLine_fileTypeExclude = ['tex', 'bib'] to avoid the conceal feature annoyance. Anyway, when I start vim with vim filename.tex my vimrc gets loaded properly, but when I simply call vim and then open a given tex file, it'll ignore the vimrc.
Any idea what's causing it? Also, let me know what information you need, as I am far from certain on what would be needed.
EDIT:
Okay so I've found that for both cases i'm in a [tex] environment, but if I'm in a [plaintex] environment then the weirdness doesn't happen. If that helps anyone.
2nd EDIT:
New development, it is only the first file that's opened that seems to ignore the exclusion for indentLine, the remainder are shown exactly as they ought to.
The plaintex is a separate filetype in Vim (cp. :help ft-plaintex), so you need to add it to the IndentLine config:
let g:indentLine_fileTypeExclude = ['tex', 'plaintex', 'bib']
Edit This now looks like a command ordering issue. It's hard to remotely troubleshoot this, as the exact plugins and their initialization order may be important. Please capture a full log of a Vim session with vim -V20vimlog. After quitting Vim, examine the vimlog log file for the ordering of commands (but it might be difficult to see what's happening in a potentially vast list of commands).
It might be sufficient to just reload the first file that has those problems, with :e!.
Can't seem to find any reason for this, but I have been using Ycm, syntastic, and all the lh- plugins with vim for a while now. In the case of lh-brackets, I used to have a problem with it generating "«»" every time it 'automatically' generated the other bracket, paren, quote, etc. But it was only happening in .vim files, so i turned it off for vim files in my vimrc. Now nothing has changed, no new scripts installed, and all of the sudden, this happens with ALL files (cpp, h, pl, py, etc). Like i said, not using heavy customization, and everything is default except the disabling of lh-brackets when editing vim files, but that has now become a hotkey since i cant use it anywhere.
My Question is this: does anyone have this or similar problem with lh-brackets, and if so, any idea how to fix it, or is there some setting I am missing?
My first thoughts are to go though and check any updated vim scripts (this just happened a day ago) that could have been updated when doing an apt-get upgrade (like debian.vim) but after that I've got nothing...
The placeholders characters can be jumped to (:h <Plug>MarkersJumpF -> <C-J> with vim, <m-ins> with gvim). That's their purpose.
If you have installed lh-cpp, see :h lh-cpp-first-steps, you'll find a quick guide to my C++ suite (and lh-brackets incidentally).
EDIT: The plugin was badly designed. I've patched the plugin to rely on g:usemarks in order to fix the ergonomic of plugin .
In the (now-) past, if you wanted to set b:usemarks to 0, you'd have needed to add an autocommand that'd set b:usemarks to 0 in all new buffers.
Now, (lh-brackets v2.2.0), if you want to always disable the placeholders/marker characters, you need to set g:usemarks to 0, not b:usemarks. Buffer-local variables are meant to be set from ftplugins, or tree/project-local plugins which are supported thanks to plugins like local_vimrc.
And as romainl has pointed out, don't hesitate to use the bug trackers, or even to contact me.
hmm found it:
:let b:usemarks=0
now needs to be set, apparently that was a marker for integration to another plugin, though i dont use it.