Linux.ie: VI Tutorial III

[ Thanks to Ken Guest
for this link. ]

“Some of the features that I am going to describe in this
tutorial are only available in version 5 of ViM – and even then
only if those features were enabled at compile time. To find out
what version you are using, and what the active feature set is, use
the :version command. By using this command, vim will display
its version number and list the set of features that are available
with it. Features named with a ‘+’ in front were enabled at compile
time, those with a ‘-‘ were not.”

“The vimrc file is a plain text file which is looked at when you
start ViM. It is hidden under Linux, in that it is called ‘.vimrc’,
and kept in your home directory. The file is used to store commands
that you would otherwise have to type in each time that you start
up the editor. You can only have one command per line, and these
commands can be commented out with a double quote (‘”‘). For
example, most vimrc files will have ‘set wrapmargin=1’ in them
somewhere so that wordwrap is turned on automatically. With the
abbreviation command that I covered in the last tutorial you can
also use the vimrc file so that ViM will correct your more typical
spelling mistakes.”

“Over time, your vimrc file could grow to be quite big. It could
also get a bit complicated to keep it all in synch – especially if
you use vim on more than one machine and a portion of one vimrc is
machine specific and you don’t want to use an exact copy on the
other machine. There is a nice solution to this scenario, break
down the vimrc file into smaller files and use the ‘source’ command
in your vimrc file. The source command takes the form of ‘source ‘.
What it does is read that file and execute the commands that are in
it.”

Complete
Story