A portable, powerful, organized and self-contained configuration tree for Vim
UPDATE (2013-03-11): After several months of daily usage and continuous improvement, my Vim config tree changed substantially (for the better).
It is already a well-known fact that I love Vim. I use it for programming, for technical AND non-technical writing (combined with LaTeX) and - of course - just for fun sometimes (within my definition of fun). I had several “long attempts” at using Vim, but only in the last months I really decided to concentrate on extracting the maximum I could from Vim and use it everyday, for everything suitable.
During this journey, I knew I would be tinkering with a lot of configuration and plugins, and therefore I wanted to make customization as easy as possible. Also, I wanted to use Vim wherever I happened to be working, and so I needed to make my Vim setup as multiplatform and self-contained as possible. Ideally, I would just have to have a vim-cfg directory on a pendrive and feel at home in whichever Linux or Windows computer I might be working at.
These goals have been almost 100% achieved. So for extra fame and glory, I uploaded this modular and cross-platform vim setup to GitHub. I won’t go into much detail about this setup because the README (shown in the link above) already does a good job at teaching you how to install and use the functionalities provided.
Besides being a framework in which you can easily do your own customization while maintaining modularity and portability, this setup also includes a lot of “reasonable defaults”, which are customizations I have come to like during these last months of heavy Vim usage. My goal when defining which customizations to include was to reduce repetitive work, by making the most frequent actions use the least keystrokes. The use case I had in mind was a programmer using Vim every day :) Here are some of these customizations:
One-stroke keybindings for frequent actions: Navigating the filesystem, compiling and navigating compiler errors, navigating a source file by jumping to tags, moving between and resizing split windows…
Segregated metafiles: Keeps
.swp,xyz~, and other silly Vim metafiles in a centralized directory, out of your way.Easy and organized plugin management: Using NeoBundle.
Combines Vim internal make command with parallel builds: As I already described in a previous blog post.
Easy tag management: Tags are generated, regenerated on demand and managed automatically, without getting in your way, by using vim-easytags.
Now go ahead and try it out! Clone the repository and follow the installation instructions on README.md. As a last but very important remark, I’d like to thank from the bottom of my heart all the developers that wrote the AWESOME plugins I’m using. They are making my (and will make your) life easier! They deserve all the props… I feel as if I am “standing on the shoulders of giants” :)