A.J.Mechelynck wrote:
I personally recommend to create the following as $HOME/_vimrc (or $HOME/.vimrc) immediately after first installation, and to add tweaks as one gets going: ...
Good advice, as always, Tony. But I am trying to crack a different nut. In the BOF talk, Bram really was asking for ideas on what would make new users flock to Vim. These days there are a lot of really good editors. No one is going to spend a couple of hours methodically working through vimtutor (sorry Bram!). A new user is just going to try Vim as an editor. If the default Vim behaviour confuses or upsets the user, Vim will never be used again. I sense an attitude here that it's just the luser's loss if they don't learn how to use Vim. Fair enough, but there should be a way for a non-vi user to enter a command telling Vim "I'm one of those 95% of people who use a modern PC - please switch to a useful mode". I had the experience of advising a very competent programmer who got a job working on virtual memory in the Linux kernel (previously he had only dabbled in Linux, and had developed under Windows). At the time, we couldn't meet, and I was restricted to providing advice via email. Let me tell you, it is pretty well impossible to convince someone to use Vim via email. The guy wanted to do stuff right now, and I would send some 100-line email with instructions on how he could do this and that to vimrc, and then everything would be simple. One problem was how search highlighting is persistent (which is great), but it is very distracting to some people when you want to turn your attention to another issue. Telling him how to map a key to do ':nohl' is just unnecessary mumbo jumbo. John
