Sane Vim defaults (from Neovim)

Vim comes with a set of often outdated and counter-intuitive defaults. Vim has been around for around 30 years, and it only makes sense that many defaults did not age well.

Neovim addresses this issue by being shipped with many default options tweaked for modern editing experience. If you can’t or don’t want to use Neovim - I highly recommend setting some these defaults in your .vimrc:

if !has('nvim')
  set nocompatible
  syntax on

  set autoindent
  set autoread
  set backspace=indent,eol,start
  set belloff=all
  set complete-=i
  set display=lastline
  set formatoptions=tcqj
  set history=10000
  set incsearch
  set laststatus=2
  set ruler
  set sessionoptions-=options
  set showcmd
  set sidescroll=1
  set smarttab
  set ttimeoutlen=50
  set ttyfast
  set viminfo+=!
  set wildmenu
endif

The defaults above enable some of the nicer editor features, like autoindent (respecting existing indentation), incsearch (search as you type), or wildmenu (enhanced command-line completion). The defaults also smooth out some historical artifacts, like unintuitive backspace behavior. Keep in mind, this breaks compatibility with some older Vim versions (but it’s unlikely to be a problem for most if not all users).