You Don’t Need a Fancy Vim Setup

Vim is a highly configurable text editor designed for the terminal on UNIX systems and macOS. It’s a great choice for editing files inside a remote server or even local files, but it can quickly become hard to maintain if you start installing 20+ plugins just to make it feel like an IDE like Visual Studio Code.

What you really need is a simple configuration that makes editing smooth and gets straight to the point: editing files in the fastest and cleanest way possible.

I’ll share what actually works for me and how my setup looks—but first, let’s configure Vim.

If you already have a configuration, just edit:

~/.vimrc

If this is your first time:

touch ~/.vimrc

Copy and save the following:

" Enable syntax highlighting: A little bit of colour is always good
syntax on

" Show line numbers: So you know what line to edit and its a great way to jump between lines. 
set number

" Enable mouse support: So you can click any part of the line you want to edit and scroll betweeen the file.
set mouse=a

" Better indentation: So your code looks more organized, there are some languange that are strict about identation
set autoindent
set smartindent
set tabstop=2
set shiftwidth=2
set expandtab

" Highlight search: it will highlight when you search a word inside Vim
set hlsearch
set incsearch

" Enable clipboard sharing
set clipboard=unnamedplus

After saving it, this is an example of how it will look like:

That's it. Congrats! You have made Vim readable, predictable, and usable everywhere.