I just learned something new for example today - using the ".dir-locals.el" to specify per-directory variables :)
I want to learn vi/vim, but spent already so much time learning emacs (and still feeling baby in it... which is good!)
Nobody has really mastered Emacs. Nobody.
There's simply too much detail, much of it hidden in the shadows.
Thanks!
What could be interesting addition, would be to see how these change over time, ie .vimrc trends.
I had a similar idea for analyzing dotfiles stats, which was subsequently filed in evernote as a 'yet-another-hack-i-would-like-to-do-someday-but-realistically-probably-will-not' ;)
I'd welcome any feedback on how to better present interesting data, or answer any questions. Thanks!
It may be a simple and trivial question to some, but more importantly, I think the methodology was very well done because I feel can trust your results, which should be the goal of ANY empirical analysis.
https://github.com/alexmcpherson
One is a scaffolded rails app with interesting folders /scraper and /files
And the other is the microsite that was linked in the parent post
:set nocompatible
A lot of people put it at the top of their .vimrc, usually together with a comment telling that it's needed for many options and features to work correctly.
But Vim actually switches itself to "nocompatible" mode if it finds a vimrc. It can be the default vimrc in /usr/share/vim/vim7x/ or your own .vimrc, it doesn't matter.
You can test this by removing this line from your .vimrc, launching another Vim instance and doing :set compatible? With or without that line, you'll get nocompatible.
Having this line in your .vimrc essentially does nothing: it sets something "on" that was already "on". As such it's useless cruft but it is not dangerous.
The real problem with it is that it demonstrates a dangerous cargo cult trend among Vim users who copy/paste entire vimrcs from Github or top ranking blog posts without thinking about it for a second. Because this line and the comment appeared in a rather famous blog post(1) by a rather famous vimmer it's now just… everywhere.
I have a lot of respect for Steve Losh and I absolutely don't blame him for including this line in his post: it's useless but harmless so there's no big deal. I certainly have a lot of useless redundant stuff in my .vimrc, too. And I'm totally guilty of using his whole .vimrc verbatim when I started.
But all the people who copied this line from him or from others who copied it from others who copied it from him (who probably copied it from someone else, why not?) should show a little less lazyness, I believe. And a more critical mind.