.vimrc contains Vim commands executed upon startup and allows you to tweak the editor's behaviour in a myriad of ways. Here is a minimal collection of some sensible non-default settings.

set nocompatible " allow breaking vanilla vi compatibility - required for adv. features 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 " Vim 5+ comes with syntax highlighting for many languages, enable it if available if has("syntax")

syntax on

endif