The new Vim 8 on Debian tries again to appeal to the 95% of the people (the noobs) and adds features the are annoying to professionals. When these new features are buggy it’s even worse.
Problem: vim 8 on debian 9 has some annoying default settings for vim
- paste uses a vim internal clipboard instead the system clipboard (when not using shift). This is totally stupid because if you copy something from the browser to the editor you get something else. It might even be some thing you copied hours ago from a different file logged in from a different client
- The cursor jumps to the mouse cursor when clicking into vim. This sounds correct for non professional geeks but it’s actually annoying because I use “hjkl” to move the cursor and use the mouse to copy/paste and I hate it when I loose the cursor position when selecting text for copy/paste
- Syntax highlighting is so ugly and hard to read. Noobs may like this but again for professional geeks that’s annoying.
Changing this system wide should be easy by adding these two lines to /etc/vim/vimrc. But this fails.
syntax off
set mouse=
Settings in /etc/vim/vimrc are ignored because settings in /etc/vim/vimrc are overruled by “/usr/share/vim/vim80/defaults.vim”
Workaround: until Debian fixes this bug, you have two ways to change this.
Add the lines from above to “/usr/share/vim/vim80/defaults.vim” directly.
Remember that this change might be over written when vim is updated.
When you don’t like the autoindent feature you can also add this line:
filetype plugin indent off
If you want to be save for system updates you can ignore default.vim all together by adding “/etc/vim/vimrc.local” to your system with this content:
let g:skip_defaults_vim = 1
set mouse=””