An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Janus: Vim Distribution
This is a distribution of plug-ins and mappings for Vim, Gvim and
MacVim.
It is designed to provide minimal working environment using the most
popular plug-ins and the most common mappings.
The distribution is completely customisable using a ~/.vimrc.before
and ~/.vimrc.after Vim RC files.
Updating to the latest version
To update to the latest version of the distribution, just run rake
inside your ~/.vim directory.
NOTE: If you ever have an error updating Janus relating to a
missing commit in a submodule, please try running rake again before
submitting an issue.
Mailing list
The mailing list is hosted at Google
Groups, please join it for
discussion and announcements.
Pre-requisites
The distribution is designed to work with Vim >= 7.3.
The distribution also requires ack, ctags, git, ruby and rake.
For the most comfortable experience, use the GUI version of Vim. Linux
users should install gvim, OSX users should install
MacVim. The recommended way of
installing MacVim is using
Homebrew, but before installing
MacVim you need to use system-wide Python (If you are using python that
is):
If you're using pythonbrew: do pythonbrew off
$ brew install macvim
If you don't use Homebrew, you can still download MacVim
here.
Take a look at the Pre-requisites wiki
page for more
information.
Installation
To install Janus, please use our automatic
installer
, which backs up any Vim files found in your home folder and installs
Janus.
$ curl -L https://bit.ly/janus-bootstrap | bash
Customization
You can use ~/.gvimrc.before and ~/.vimrc.before for settings Janus itself uses,
such as the leader setting. You may also use ~/.gvimrc.after and
~/.vimrc.after for any additional settings; it is also a good place for
overriding Janus settings, as both files will be loaded at the end of
Janus.
For example, to override the default color schemes:
$ echo 'color desert' >> ~/.vimrc.after
$ echo 'color molokai' >> ~/.gvimrc.after
If you want to do additional customization or add more Vim plugins,
create a ~/.janus directory and add your plugins there, either with a
git clone or by adding submodules to your own git repository there.
This directory is treated like a normal pathogen directory. For example:
$ cd ~/.janus
$ git clone https://github.com/vim-scripts/Rename2.git rename2
Or, if you have a git repository in ~/.janus, you can use a submodule:
$ cd ~/.janus
$ git submodule add https://github.com/vim-scripts/Rename2.git rename2
If you would like to disable an included plug-in, you can do that with
the janus#disable_plugin() function from inside your
~/.vimrc.before. This function takes a plug-in name as an argument
without the group. For example, if you would like to disable the
NERDCommenter plug-in, you can do that with the command:
$ echo "call janus#disable_plugin('nerdcommenter')" >> ~/.vimrc.before
WARNING: We've noticed over and over, that people fork Janus just to
customize it. This is bad practice for several reasons and you should
not do that, and here's why:
Janus is fully customisable and there's no need to change the core for
using a different plugin fork or using a different mapping.
Forking means maintenance; maintenance means burden. Do not burden
yourself with maintaining a fork; that's what the ~/.janus folder
is for.
If you find yourself needing a customisation that is not possible with
the current setup, then please open an issue or consider submitting a
pull request to make it possible to continue using/improving the official repo.
WARNING: Any uncommited files inside the janus folder will be
removed the next time you run rake so make sure to either put them in
the custom folder (~/.janus), or commit them. We clean the janus
folder in case we replace a manually installed plugin (using rake tasks)
with a submodule.
For more information on how to customize Janus, you might want to take
a look at the Customization wiki
page.
Additional you can see Example of customization.
Intro to VIM
Here're some tips in case you've never used VIM before:
Tutorials
Type vimtutor into a shell to go through a brief interactive
tutorial inside VIM.
Watch this presentation at VIM: Walking Without Crutches or read the slides on Speaker Deck.
Watch the screencasts at vimcasts.org
Watch Derek Wyatt's energetic tutorial videos at his site
Read wycats' perspective on learning Vim at
Everyone who tried to convince me to use vim was wrong
Read this and other answers to a question about vim at StackOverflow:
Your problem with Vim is that you don't grok vi
Read the Getting Started with Vim tutorial on SitePoint
Read the Effective Rails Development with Vim tutorial on SitePoint
Modes
VIM has three modes:
insert mode- stuff you type is added to the buffer
normal mode- keys you hit are interpreted as commands
visual mode- allows you to select blocks of text
To enter insert mode, hit i
To exit insert mode, hit <ESC>
To enter visual mode, hit v
To exit visual mode, hit <ESC>
Useful commands
Use :q to exit vim
Certain commands are prefixed with a <Leader> key, which maps to \
by default. You can, for example, use let mapleader = "," to change this to a comma. If you want this
to be in effect for uses of <Leader> in the .vimrc file, make sure to define
this in ~/.vimrc.before
Keyboard cheat sheet.
Features
This Vim distribution includes a number of packages built by others.
Base Customizations
Janus ships with a number of basic customizations for vim:
Line numbers
Ruler (line and column numbers)
No wrap (turn off per-buffer via :set wrap)
Soft 2-space tabs, and default hard tabs to 2 spaces
Show trailing whitespace as .
Make searching highlighted, incremental, and case insensitive unless a
capital letter is used
Always show a status line
Allow backspacing over everything (indentations, eol, and start
characters) in insert mode
<C-P> inserts the directory of the current file into a command
Automatically resize splits when resizing the Vim window (GUI only)
<leader>ew expands to :e (directory of c
Read the full README on GitHub