Notes

less .viminfo to view recent history in vim. could possibly recover lost files / information if needed.

Custom .vimrc

If ~/.vimrc does not exist in your home directory, create it, and customize it to suit your needs. For example, the following .vimrc will set your tab size to 2 from the default 4, and convert your tabs to spaces automatically. This is useful when sharing code, as things are more compact and using spaces is less ambiguous than tab sizes across platforms.

set tabstop=2 shiftwidth=2 expandtab
set autoindent

Here, tabstop is the tab size setting, measured in spaces. shiftwidth allows vim to compensate according to our tab settings when automatically indenting, etc. expandtab converts our tab size setting into actual spaces. set autoindent will set vim to automatically indent to our current depth when in insert mode and moving to a new line by pressing enter. This will not insert spaces unless text is input.