Useful .vimrc Settings

Customizing vi can improve your productivity. By editing ~/.vimrc you can define a set of commands which are run when vi starts. The following commands can be especially useful.

:set showmatch     highlights the matching brace or parenthesis in your code

:syntax on     enables basic syntax highlighting

:set expandtab     mixing tabs and spaces in source files is bad news
    enable expandtab to automatically convert your tabs to spaces

:set ts=4     sets the number of spaces used to display a tab

:set shiftwidth=4     sets the number of spaces by which to indent as a result of '>>' for example

:set ruler     displays the current line and column number
    useful for restricting your code to 80 characters (if you're into that)

At the very least, syntax highlighting provides a major boost to readability.