vim-sensible

I disagree with the notion that you have to write your own vimrc from scratch in order to become a proficient vim user. Don't waste your time pouring over the documentation and trying to get things just right, vim is a pretty old program and a lot of useful config options are not on by default, nor are they easy to understand by a skim of the documentation. There's no point to having a deep understanding of them, because you want them on 100% of the time. Start by copying someone else's vimrc (vim-sensible [1] is a great starting point) and tweak it as needed. My $0.02 is to avoid plugins until you have used vim for a substantial amount of time. [1]: https://github.com/tpope/vim-sensible/blob/master/plugin/sen...

For an easy start, use a sane defaults plugin like sensible.vim [1] or vim-simple-defaults [2] (more opiniated). Also, use vim-plug [3] with few plugin like ctrlp, nerdtree, nerdcommenter and vim-simple-complete [4].) [1] https://github.com/tpope/vim-sensible [2] https://github.com/maxboisvert/vim-simple-defaults [3] https://github.com/junegunn/vim-plug [4] https://github.com/maxboisvert/vim-simple-complete I am the author of [2] and [4].

Disclaimer: I committed that change. If you think the issue is important, you are free to report it; the project has reverted decisions like this when people have complained (most recently, the default value of the `mouse` setting). On the other hand, considering how much time this had to be discussed, I would think that by and large this is not a mayor concern for users. This commit was made In June 2015, and the discussion about defaults goes as far back as essentially the beginnings of the project in 2014. We inherited this setting from sensible.vim (which many people consider, well, a very sensible minimal configuration), where the issue was discussed and dismissed back in 2013 (https://github.com/tpope/vim-sensible/issues/64). I think the argument there is convincing. Again, if you don't, please discuss it in the appropriate channels

I would recommend against starting with someone else's pimped out configs and go with something more conservative. Tim Pope's sensible.vim is a good starting point. It has "sensible defaults" but no opinionated keyboard configs, extra plugins or so. https://github.com/tpope/vim-sensible That's pretty much all I have, plus a few personal shortcut keys and some syntax highlights that aren't included in vanilla vim. It's pretty short, I recommend copying it to your .vimrc, understanding every line (:help) and modifying to taste.