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 /etc/vimrc and ~/.vimrc (i.e., the global vimrc and the user-specific one). Note that this is only true if you compiled vim using LFS-3.1 onwards. Prior to this, the global vimrc was /usr/share/vim/vimrc.
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
A FAQ on the LFS mailing lists regards the comment tags in vimrc. Note that they 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.
Last updated on 2005-08-01 13:29:19 -0600