Penguin
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.vimrc is the file that is executed by default by the text editor Vim upon startup. It is generally a good idea to put a .vimrc in your home directory with some useful setting in it.

There are a whole host of useful settings, but a few common ones follow

set nocompatible " Make Vim behave less like vi and more like Vim - this makes vim a lot easier to user syntax on " Syntax highlight whatever language you are editing, Vim supports many languages set incsearch " Enable incremental searching by default set showmatch " Highlight the matches of the last search set backspace=2 " allow backspacing over everything in insert mode set autoindent " always set autoindenting on set textwidth=0 " Don't wrap words by default " Vim5 comes with syntaxhighlighting. The next lines turn it on if has("syntax")

syntax on

endif

vimrc is also capable of on-the-fly gzip and bzip2? (de)compression.