This post covers how I set up vim to work in my environment. It will also be themed with the Nord colorscheme, and will include some keybinds to navigate my environment quicker.
Homebrew Installation
Vim can be installed through Homebrew with:
$ brew install vim
Vim Package Manager (vim-plug)
There are a number of package managers explicitly designed for vim. The one I’ve picked is called vim-plug which the Nord project links as a way to install the colorscheme.
Plug first needs to be installed. To do this for a mac, run:
curl -fLo ~/.local/share/nvim/site/autoload/plug.vim --create-dirs https://raw.githubusercontent.com/junegunn/vim-plug/master/plug.vim
Then, the Nord colorscheme is installed by first including the following text at the top of ~/.vimrc:
call plug#begin(expand('~/.vim/plugged'))
Plug 'arcticicestudio/nord-vim'
call plug#end()
colorscheme nord
save the changes and exit vim (:wq), then reopen ~/.vimrc and type :PlugInstall when in NORMAL mode. Close out and reopen the editor again, and you will see the colorscheme applied.
Custom Statusbar with vim-airline
To get the cool lean status bar at the bottom of Vim, I installed a Vim package called vim-airline.
Simply enter the line Plug 'vim-airline/vim-airline' between the plug#begin(...) and plug#end() sections, and then follow the same method as above to install it with :PlugInstall.
If you want to get the neat angular design, add the line let g:airline_powerline_fonts = 1 underneath the colorscheme nord entry:
...
colorscheme nord
let g:airline_powerline_fonts = 1
Miscellaneous options
Enable the next set of options to show line numbers and syntax:
syntax enable " enable syntax highlighting
set autoindent " autoindent new lines
set number " Show current line number
set relativenumber " Show relative line numbers
To quickly toggle the line numbers on the left, you can type :set nu! rnu!. This blog post goes into great detail about line number options in Vim, complete with gifs.
To show special non-printable characters, add these following 2 lines:
" Show non-printing characters
set listchars=tab:»\ ,trail:·,nbsp:␣,extends:>,precedes:<
set list
The following 3 sets of options are pretty self-explanatory. However, if you want to access the built-in help feature in Vim (as opposed to the far simpler Google search), you can type :help commandname, where commandname is quite intuitively: the command name.
" Highlight the current cursor line and column
set cursorline
set cursorcolumn
" Show a visual autocomplete menu
set wildmenu
" search as characters are entered
set incsearch
This last option I have in my vimrc allows for more powerful backspace behavior. It makes vim backspace over everything in insert mode, which is the intuitive way backspacing works. I include the stackoverflow link so I can quickly reference why I set the option in the first place:
" source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/11560415
set backspace=indent,eol,start " more powerful backspacing
That wraps it up for my Vim configuration!! Hope it was helpful!