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.