The LFS book installs Vim as its text editor. At this point it should be noted that there are a lot of different editing applications out there including Emacs, nano, Joe and many more. Anyone who has been around the Internet (especially usenet) for a short time will certainly have observed at least one flame war, usually involving Vim and Emacs users!
The LFS book creates a basic vimrc
file. In this section you'll find an attempt to enhance this file. At
startup, vim reads the
global configuration file (/etc/vimrc)
as well as a user-specific file (~/.vimrc). Either or both can be tailored to suit
the needs of your particular system.
Here is a slightly expanded .vimrc that
you can put in ~/.vimrc to provide user
specific effects. Of course, if you put it into /etc/skel/.vimrc instead, it will be made available
to users you add to the system later. You can also copy the file from
/etc/skel/.vimrc to the home directory
of users already on the system, such as root. Be sure to set permissions, owner, and
group if you do copy anything directly from /etc/skel.
" Begin .vimrc
set columns=80
set wrapmargin=8
set ruler
" End .vimrc
Note that the comment tags are " instead of the more usual # or //.
This is correct, the syntax for vimrc
is slightly unusual.
Below you'll find a quick explanation of what each of the options in this example file means here:
set columns=80: This simply sets
the number of columns used on the screen.
set wrapmargin=8: This is the
number of characters from the right window border where
wrapping starts.
set ruler: This makes vim show the current row and
column at the bottom right of the screen.
More information on the many
vim options can be
found by reading the help inside vim itself. Do this by typing
:help in vim to get the general help, or by
typing :help usr_toc.txt to view the User Manual Table of
Contents.
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