How to Vim: Build your .vimrc from Scratch

People often think that getting started with Vim means spending hours crafting an elaborate .vimrc with dozens of plugins. In reality, modern Vim (9+) and Neovim ship with remarkably sane defaults, and you can get very far with a configuration that’s just a few lines long – or even no configuration at all.

Starting with No .vimrc

If you launch Vim 9 without a .vimrc file, it automatically loads defaults.vim – a built-in configuration that provides a solid foundation. Here’s what you get for free:

• syntax on – syntax highlighting
• filetype plugin indent on – filetype detection, language-specific plugins, and automatic indentation
• set incsearch – incremental search (results appear as you type)
• set scrolloff=5 – keeps 5 lines of context around the cursor
• set display=truncate – shows @@@ instead of hiding truncated lines
• set mouse=a – mouse support in all modes
• Q remapped to gq (text formatting) instead of the mostly useless Ex mode
• And several other quality-of-life improvements

That’s actually a pretty reasonable editing experience out of the box! You can read the full details with :h defaults.vim.

Neovim goes even further with its defaults – it enables autoindent (copies indentation from the previous line), hlsearch (highlights all search matches), smarttab (makes Tab smarter at the start of a line), autoread (reloads files changed outside the editor), always shows the statusline, and sets the command history to 10000 entries, among many other things. If you’re on Neovim, the out-of-the-box experience is excellent. See :h vim-differences for the full list.

The defaults.vim Gotcha

Here’s something that trips up a lot of people: the moment you create a .vimrc file – even an empty one – Vim stops loading defaults.vim entirely. That means you lose all those nice defaults.

The fix is simple. Start your .vimrc with:

source $VIMRUNTIME/defaults.vim

This loads the defaults first, and then your own settings override or extend them as needed.

This gotcha only applies to Vim. Neovim’s defaults are always active regardless of whether you have an init.vim or init.lua.

A Minimal .vimrc

Here’s a minimal .vimrc that builds on the defaults and adds a few things most people want:

source $VIMRUNTIME/defaults.vim

set number            " show line numbers
set ignorecase        " case-insensitive search...
set smartcase         " ...unless you type a capital
set expandtab         " use spaces instead of tabs
set shiftwidth=4      " indent by 4 spaces

That’s five settings on top of the defaults. You might not even need all of them – defaults.vim already handles the fundamentals.

For Neovim, you don’t need the source line – all the defaults.vim equivalents are already active. You also get autoindent, hlsearch, and smarttab for free, so the only settings left to add are the ones that are genuinely personal preference:

set number
set ignorecase
set smartcase
set expandtab
set shiftwidth=4

Built-in Filetype Support

One of the most underappreciated aspects of Vim is how much built-in support it ships for programming languages. When filetype plugin indent on is active (which it is via defaults.vim or Neovim’s defaults), you automatically get:

• Syntax highlighting for hundreds of languages – Vim ships with around 770+ syntax definitions
• Language-specific indentation rules for over 420 file types
• Filetype plugins that set sensible options per language (e.g., shiftwidth, commentstring, formatoptions)

This means that when you open a Python file, Vim already knows to use 4-space indentation. Open a Ruby file and it switches to 2 spaces. Open a Makefile and it uses tabs. All without a single plugin or line of configuration.

You can check what’s available with :echo globpath(&rtp, 'syntax/*.vim') for syntax files or :echo globpath(&rtp, 'ftplugin/*.vim') for filetype plugins. The list is impressively long.

When to Add More

At some point you’ll probably want more than the bare minimum. Here are a few things worth considering as your next steps:

• A colorscheme – Vim ships with several built-in options (try :colorscheme followed by Tab to see them). Recent Vim builds even bundle Catppuccin – a beautiful pastel theme that I’m quite fond of. Another favorite of mine is Tokyo Night, which you’ll need to install as a plugin. Neovim’s default colorscheme has also been quite good since 0.10.
• Persistent undo – set undofile lets you undo changes even after closing and reopening a file. A game changer.
• Clipboard integration – set clipboard=unnamedplus makes yank and paste use the system clipboard by default.
• vim-unimpaired – if you’re on classic Vim (not Neovim), I think Tim Pope’s vim-unimpaired is essential. It adds a consistent set of ]/[ mappings for navigating quickfix lists, buffers, adding blank lines, and much more. Neovim 0.11+ has adopted many of these as built-in defaults, but on Vim there’s no substitute.

And when you eventually want more plugins, you probably won’t need many. A fuzzy finder, maybe a Git integration, and perhaps a completion engine will cover most needs. But that’s a topic for another day.

Epilogue

The key takeaway is this: don’t overthink your .vimrc. Start with the defaults, add only what you actually need, and resist the urge to copy someone else’s 500-line configuration. A small, well-understood configuration beats a large, cargo-culted one every time.

That’s part of the reason why when I started to re-learn Vim I’ve opted to slowly build a Vim 9 configuration from scratch, instead of jumping to something like Neovim + Kickstart.nvim or LazyVim right away. Less is more. Understanding the foundations of your editor matters.¹

Right now my .vimrc is just 100 lines and I don’t foresee it becoming much bigger in the long run.

If you want to see just how far you can go without plugins, I highly recommend the Thoughtbot talk How to Do 90% of What Plugins Do (With Just Vim). It’s a great demonstration of Vim’s built-in capabilities for file finding, auto-completion, tag navigation, and more.

That’s all I have for you today. Keep hacking!

1. I guess this sounds strange coming from the author of Emacs Prelude, right? ↩︎