help me fix vim

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Fri Jan 20, 2006 10:10 am

Recent updates of vim have really started to bug me. I love vi, don't get me wrong. However, I do NOT need to have it doing "smart" things for me. The auto-intenting feature is a huge pain in the ass. So is the comment feature (I start a comment line, hit enter and get a pound at the beginning of each subsequent line - believe me, I can type '#'). I want vim to behave like vi - I rarely even need colors, though it's sometimes nice to be reminded to close loops, etc. I've done some basic googling, but figure most people here are prificient in the ways of vim, and would get me the answer. Do I need to add or comment things out of my vimrc?

Karl · Post by **Karl** » Fri Jan 20, 2006 10:22 am

On my Suse box there is a /etc/vimrc file. To disable those features you can comment out lines refering to "autoindent" and/or "smartindent".

I also checked a Gentoo box. It has vimrc under /etc/vim/vimrc and its completly differnt looking than on Suse. But each is well commented and says what to do to disable auto indenting. I'm not sure what feature the commenting is.

thetza · Post by **thetza** » Fri Jan 20, 2006 9:35 pm

ever thought about switching to Vile (VI like emacs)? imho it's a lot more "smaller" than vim. For example, all the documentation is in one file, and there's no need to maintain a ~/.vim/ directory for different filetype configurations.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Sat Jan 21, 2006 12:44 am

Karl wrote:On my Suse box there is a /etc/vimrc file. To disable those features you can comment out lines refering to "autoindent" and/or "smartindent".

I also checked a Gentoo box. It has vimrc under /etc/vim/vimrc and its completly differnt looking than on Suse. But each is well commented and says what to do to disable auto indenting. I'm not sure what feature the commenting is.

Yup. That was it. I have no idea how I missed that line before. Thanks.

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Sat Jan 21, 2006 12:48 am

thetza wrote:ever thought about switching to Vile (VI like emacs)? imho it's a lot more "smaller" than vim. For example, all the documentation is in one file, and there's no need to maintain a ~/.vim/ directory for different filetype configurations.

Considering I've never heard of it, no. I'm really a major vi head though, so I doubt I'd be interested unless it was more or less just vi. The only thing I've been unhappy with about vim recently is that it's starting to think it knows what I want better than I do. Even if I *wanted* it to indent, I can't imagine *ever* wanting every subsequent line I cut and paste into it to have an extra tab added to the beginning. That's just insane.

thetza · Post by **thetza** » Sun Jan 22, 2006 12:11 am

Snarkout wrote:Considering I've never heard of it, no. I'm really a major vi head though, so I doubt I'd be interested unless it was more or less just vi. The only thing I've been unhappy with about vim recently is that it's starting to think it knows what I want better than I do. Even if I *wanted* it to indent, I can't imagine *ever* wanting every subsequent line I cut and paste into it to have an extra tab added to the beginning. That's just insane.

I'm a big vi head too. Don't let the name turn you off. Though its not 100% compatible with the original vi, all the most common keys are the same and retain the 'finger-memory' of vi. Switching between multiple buffers is easier, and stuff like auto-indenting, auto-commenting, and other neat features are off by default. Anyways, just a thought. http://dickey.his.com/vile/vile.html

snarkout · Post by **snarkout** » Sun Jan 22, 2006 12:36 am

Looks interesting - I'll take a look.

Gomer_X · Post by **Gomer_X** » Mon Jan 23, 2006 11:34 am

Generally if you call Vim as vi, it acts like vi. On Fedora there's a symlink to accomplish this. Just do vi <filename>. You can also do 'set compatible' (or remove 'set nocompatible') in .vimrc as well. Vim can do anything, including turning off all the good stuff.

Personally I find the autoformatting works OK for me most of the time. I only hack Perl and HTML, though (for the most part).