vim-reset

A bash script so you can customize your very own VIM configurations.

vim-reset is in Public Domain, feel free to re-use it and distribute it.

what's reset?

The reset concept is borrowed from web front-end engineers. It's a good idea to first reset all browser-specific default settings before front-end engineers adding any customization.

So is vim-reset. It is intended to reset default VIM settings between different Linux distributions.

As a system administrator, I have to deal with different distros, each comes with different default VIM settings. That's really annoying. -- yegel@github

anything else?

Besides the reset process, vim-reset also provides a way to maintain your very own VIM configuration files in a different directory other than ~/.vim directory. You can put all syntax files, plugins in a dedicated directory without any modification to ~/.vim directory.

If you are familiar to python, vim-reset is like the virtualenv for VIM.

it's a dirty hack!

After reading the source code you may think that this is really a dirty hack. Yes, but this is the only way.

Vim hardcoded ~/.vim directory and ~/.vimrc file in their source code which makes it hard to customize where you can load your VIM configurations.

do I need this?

You may find vim-reset similar to pathogen.vim. But they are different. pathogen.vim manages files inside runtimepath, while vim-reset take care of your runtimepath directory.

vim-reset is very useful if you need to maintain many different sets of vim configuration files, or you are using a shared account on a server with someone else.

vim-reset makes it possible to share a complete vimrc directory to someone else with all plugins / syntax, not just ~/.vimrc.

It is also useful for plugin developers, you can customize a very specific 'runtimepath' to test your plugins.

how to use it?

git clone https://github.com/yegle/vim-reset
source vim-reset/activate
vim-reset -h

You can put your ~/.vimrc files and all your plugins/syntax files into $VIM_RESET_CONFDIR now. NOTE: vim-reset uses $VIM_RESET_CONFDIR/_vimrc as your main VIM configuration file by default, not $VIM_RESET_CONFDIR/.vimrc.

You can use --vimrc option or $VIM_RESET_VIMRC env-var to tell vim-reset to use a specific VIM configuration file.

You can use --gvimrc option or $VIM_RESET_GVIMRC env-var to tell vim-reset to use a specific GVIM configuration file.

You can use --add-rtp option or $VIM_RESET_VIMRTP env-var to add addtional VIM runtimepath, which is useful for testing plugins.

You can use --hard option or $VIM_RESET_HARD env-var to tell vim-reset to do a hard reset. By default, vim-reset will do a soft reset unless this variable is set to 1. That means the VIM variable runtimepath will contain $VIM_RESET_CONFDIR along with your old runtimepath. On the contrary, a hard reset will make sure the VIM variable runtimepath only contain the system default setting along with the paths you specified.

You can use --force option or $VIM_RESET_FORCE env-var to tell vim-reset to force re-establishing itself.

You can use --revert option or $VIM_RESET_REVERT env-var to tell vim-reset to revert the changes it has made.

You can also add source vim-reset/activate to your ~/.bashrc file, so you have vim-reset available each time you invoke an interactive shell.