Vim is great, but not perfect. The default settings are not always useful. To make Vim useful almost everyone needs to make a vimrc file with a few settings.

This is why ‘Vim distributions’ such as spf13, janus, and others exist. These setups provide people with a useful and ‘modern’ Vim experience in a short amount of time, at the price of complexity.

My first vimrc is a tool to help people set up a simple but effective vimrc for every-day use in an interactive and educational way.

This doesn’t list all possible options or things you can stick in your vimrc, only the most useful and common ones that a reasonable percentage of new(-ish) users may want to use. All options come with a detailed description of what they do. Read the descriptions!

Completely new to Vim? Start with vimtutor.

Vim’s help pages should be your first stop if you’re confused about something. See :help help-summary for instructions on how to use Vim’s excellent help system. A great many questions can be solved by effective searching and reading of the help pages.

Still stuck or want to learn more? These places might be of help:

This list does not contain any plugins yet. This is not because I am opposed to them, but rather because I haven't had the time to create a curated list. In the meanwhile, there are already a number of ‘best Vim plugins’ out there already.

You can save this webpage to your computer for offline use. It is a single HTML page.

How to use the output