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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

Defaults: Agreed, though those of us who have been on vim for a long time obviously have a .vimrc we carry around. It'd be nice to have a better set of defaults.

Plugins: Vimballs already solve this problem largely.

Automatically in insert mode: Oh gosh no. The only case where you'd want to start in insert mode, I'd guess, is a new file. If you're opening an existing file, you're not going to start wanting to type at the beginning of it. Generally the first command in a file is a search or jump to line.

The author mentioned that he wanted a plugin that can quickly comment a line. There's more than a few ways to do this manually in vim that is quick. For example, to comment a block:

^<ctrl-v><n>jI# <ctrl-[>

where <n> is the number of lines to comment. You can also easily write a command in your vimrc to comment the current line in one keystroke.

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I think it might be telling that the first I've heard of Vimballs is your comment, so I won't say much more about that :) It seems only Supertab Continued with it's odd ":%so" install thingy was a Vimball, but the author never called it that on his Vim.org/scripts page.

Automatically in insert mode is what I expected to be the most divisive comment, and it proved so! Maybe this would be solved by my distribution suggestion: new users get Vim in insert mode, seasoned vets get Vim in normal mode on start-up. There isn't one setting that will please everyone, although I do have a suspicion that the normal mode at start-up turns off more people than might be expected.

For the comment command deal, I found similar blog posts along that line. Again, I think it's the sort of command that isn't obvious to new users, and you need to be jiving with the Tao of Vim before it makes sense (I only have a half handle on it myself). I just wanted a keyboard command, like Textmate's Cmd+/ . NERD Commenter's key command is ,/, which makes me happy, and it works across multiple file types. My hope is that when I get better at Vim, I'll be able to come up with such commands myself, but I don't expect that sort of proficiency for months, if not years. I'm perhaps a slow learner ;)

Thanks for that tip I would just have Visual mode, select lines, I, and then #, Esc Esc

I need like a vim tip a day or something to show me more of these tricks.

The vim users mailing list is extremely lively and full of little tidbits like this. I highly recommend following it.

You might also be interested in #vim on freenode. Get all your questions answered in real time.

I second this, the people in #vim are awesome and usually very quick to answer your questions. It's also one of the friendliest channels I've been in, for what it's worth.

uh, that is what gfodor does, just with keyboard navigation.

Ctrl-v is used to enter (column) visual mode, and ctrl-[ is a shortcut for the esc key.

Since more and more plugins are available as git repositories, vimball becomes less important though.

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