theopn / kickstart.vim

A launch point for your personal vim configuration (Vimscript version of https://github.com/nvim-lua/kickstart.nvim)

kickstart.vim

Introduction

Kickstart.vim is a Vimscript version of Kickstart.nvim.

Kickstart.vim is not associated with core maintainers of Kickstart.nvim. Huge thanks to Kickstart.nvim for helping me with my (Neo)vim journey and inspiring me to create a little project like this.

Installation

Note

I highly recommend you to fork this repo so that you can manage your own configuration

Option #1: Manually copying and pasting the contents of the .vimrc

Option #2: Creating a symbolic link

This is an easy way to manage your Vimrc with Git as well as other configuration files.

0. Backup your existing .vimrc (e.g., mv ~/.vimrc ~/.old-vimrc.bak)
1. clone the repository in your home directory

   # Replace `theopn/kickstart.vim` with `your-username/forked-repository-name` if you made a fork
   git clone https://github.com/theopn/kickstart.vim.git ~/kickstart.vim

2. Create a symbolic link between ~/kickstart.vim/.vimrc and ~/.vimrc

   # Make sure you have backed up existing .vimrc
   # The force flag (-f) will overwrite the existing file
   ln -sf ~/kickstart.vim/.vimrc ~/.vimrc

3. Now whenever you open ~/.vimrc, you are opening ~/kickstart.vim/.vimrc. Since kickstart.vim is a Git repository, you can easily manage changes you made to your .vimrc across multiple devices.

Post Installation

Run the following command and launch Vim again, and you are ready to go!

vim +PlugInstall +qa

Notable Changes Compared to Kickstart.nvim

kickstart.vim:

• is written in Vimscript (:surprised Pikachu face:) and designed for Vim >= 0.8
• enables some settings enabled by default in Neovim (e.g., filetype, syntax, autoindent, etc.) on the top of kickstart.nvim settings
• disables undofile by default, but the instructions for changing undodir and enabling undofile are included
• uses Vimscript alternatives like:
  • vim-plug
  • vim-lsp
  • fzf & fzf.vim
• does not provide an alternative for:
  • highlight on yank
  • nvim-treesitter
• omits Lua configuration and comments irrelevant to Vim
• is overall simpler than Kickstart.nvim

The best way to understand is to read the configuration!