Opinionated dotfiles for vim, zsh, git and OS X | Hacker News Reader

Opinionated dotfiles for vim, zsh, git and OS X

skwp.github.com

62 pointsgglanzani30 comments

Who is this for?

While I appreciate the effort and attention to detail that was put into this, I don't think this is really useful to anyone as it is intended.

For a new or novice Vim user, this kind of thing is too much at once and could actually be harmful. To properly learn, you need to start using things one at a time until they are internalized. Only then should you move on to the next new plugin or set of mappings. Including too many plugins at once is harmful because users will become complacent and won't end up using most of what they have there.

For experienced users, you can't just throw away all your existing stuff and replace it with a bunch of stuff someone else has chosen. You would certainly encounter unexpected changes in behavior and conflicting maps or plugins.

That said, it is always great and useful to look through other people's dotfiles, and to selectively use pieces and ideas from them. I did see some things that look interesting to me, so I'll take those and work them into my environment.

This is a great effort, but it would be better to find ways of teaching new tools incrementally, not just saying "Here's all this great stuff I use. It's the best so you should use it too. Just download my dotfiles and you'll be all set."

> Apple-style philosophy: make everything Just Work and Look Good. Don't worry about too many options.

...I guess that's why vim is the best editor, and why they need to be using oh-my-zsh on top of zsh?

Nice config setup even if it is hilarious to me that they pretend to be worried about having 'too many options'. Works for me anyway, that's never been something I've worried about too much.

Every time I see a vimrc with shortcuts that have the sole purpose of editing one's vimrc, I can't avoid thinking these guys are over doing it.

Overdoing it? Nah. When I see a vim hack that I like it is just a quick key combo away to make it so.

That particular hack is among my favourite. I think I learned it from Steve Losh. It means that if I'm editing away and I notice some repetitive task I keep running into, I can quickly open up my vimrc, create a mapping and then source it again all in a few keystrokes. Totally changed the way I use vim.

Am I the only one who can't use Solarized because it gives me a headache? I'm not trolling, I'm being serious. The contrast between the text and the background is lower than in a black background/white foreground setup. It strains my eyes, giving me a headache after about 10 minutes or so.

No, you are not the only one.

For vim I really like the github color theme: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2855. I do use solarized for my term though.

I wish for a higher contrast as well. That's really unfortunate because that's one of the theme which is nice, well thought and ubiquitous.

Right now I'm using Molokai.

I fixed this for myself by changing the background to a darkish brown: https://github.com/ajacksified/vim-colors-solarized-brown

Similar still, but a little higher contrast.

Oh Boy! Now, I'm kinda relieved that I'm not one of the only few who's not impressed by Solarized. I tried it with Sublime Text because it's one of the very popular theme. However, I went back to a much higher contrast setting like - Monokai - that comes default with Sublime Text is pretty good.

Sooo many vim plugins...

I have 19 installed (and I think that's too many). Out of those 19, I regularly use 5 or less (not including passive ones like Vundle). My goal is to reduce the amount of crap I have to load, not add as much crap as possible just in case.

I'm down to 47 plugins[1]. Only 27 if you don't count the language additions and Vundle. I've whittled it down over many months of scrutiny. I do actually make use of almost all of the plugins daily.

[1]:https://github.com/mutewinter/dot_vim

I have actually been using your dot_vim repository as a base for my configuration. I like how you have things set up, but I don't do things like RoR development (I do still have vim-rails installed, though...). So, thanks for making everything nice and tidy.

Also, I know this isn't something you should have to answer, but is there a way to close buffers with LustyJuggler?

No way that I know of. I tend to leave my buffers open indefinitely for the entire session. I work in splits and am constantly rotating buffers using Command-T, NERDTree, and LustyJuggler.

19 is too many. I use one: NERDTree, and I bind Leader-n to NERTTreeToggle. It's invaluable to me.

I recently switched to Command-T. For me it is faster than NERDTree, especially if you know what file you need to open.

For example: Leader-t, type several characters, enter is a way faster navigating through file hierarchy, in my opinion.

What vim or zsh dotfiles aren't opinionated? I'm interested in seeing some which provide saner defaults without opinions, to use as a common base for other dotfiles and to be able to recommend to anyone without having to sell them on anything - sort of like a CSS reset + sane defaults. Vim comes with some things that are just stupid.

»OSX is the best OS. MacVim is the best editor. Zsh is the best shell. Pry is the best irb. Solarized is the best color scheme.«

It should probably be called »Chauvinist starter pack«.

He called in opinionated... So this allows such opinionated description of his tools.

Must we hash out, again, the difference between "opinionated" and "douchey"?

"OSX is the best OS. MacVim is the best editor. Zsh is the best shell. Pry is the best irb. Solarized is the best color scheme."

This is hilarious. No, thanks.

I wish he would describe this as his personal set up, rather than some sort of mega pack. It just seems like a lot of marketing over someone's settings...

I see a lot of key bindings for buffers, but few for tabs.

Am I the only one who uses tabs in vim? They're great.

Slightly related question: It seems zsh is gaining in popularity. What is the learning curve like coming from bash? Is it a "superset" of bash or completely different?

zsh is pretty much a superset of bash, I'd expect most bash scripts to work with zsh with no modification whatsoever, even using most of bash's more advanced features.

basically depends on how much of bash you've been using. i'd say it's a strict superset of 99% of what 99% of bash users do. the prompt language is about the only thing i can think of at the moment that most people ever touch at all that's significantly different. (if you're into writing custom completion modules or something, that's part's completely different.)

> For the love of all that is holy, stop abusing your hands! Remap caps-lock to escape

Personally I map it to nothing. On all the desktop/portable machines I regularly use (both Linux and Windows) cap-lock is effectively a dead key, and as all the servers I have reason to connect to are connected to using terminals running on one of those desktops/portables the same is true there too.

Why map it to nothing when you can put it to good use instead?

Now, I'm an Emacs user, so having Caps Lock as Control is even more important, but I've found it nice even in normal programs like Chrome. The only time it's inconvenient is when I'm using somebody else's different physical machine, but that happens sufficiently infrequently that it's worth the slight annoyance.

> make everything Just Work and Look Good. Don't worry about too many options.

> MacVim is the best editor.

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