TL;DR

To make a default Vim installation more useful, type the following 5 lines into its .vimrc file:

set hls
set ic
set is
set nu
set noswf

Or if you prefer, copy and paste the spelled out and annotated version:

set hlsearch    " highlight all search results
set ignorecase  " do case insensitive search 
set incsearch   " show incremental search results as you type
set number      " display line number
set noswapfile  " disable swap file

For what it’s worth, the acronym for the 5 lines is HIINN.

Edit: Multiple people on HN have pointed out that the 5 lines can be combined into a single line like below. I didn’t know about this capability, but will definitely start doing this from now on:

set hls ic is nu noswf

Also, as mentioned below, this is for temporary environments where you read more than you edit. For your local set up, it’s better to take the time to properly maintain the config file and install plugins as needed.

Motivation

Vim is a powerful text editor for Unix/Linux, and I use it frequently to view and edit files. Unfortunately, Vim’s default configurations lack several important usability features compared to popular alternative text editors, such as VSCode.

The undesirable defaults are not an issue on my own computer, as I can take the time to configure them. However, often I’d find myself debugging or reading logs on near-fresh Linux installations (eg. virtual machines spun up to do integration testing), where Vim had not yet been configured.

So over time, I distilled the text editor features that I needed the most, and came up with the list above. To set it up, I would run vim ~/.vimrc, manually enter those 5 lines in whichever order that I remembered them, then quit and restart Vim to pick up the new configurations.

Discussion

The first 4 lines are straightforward - most popular modern text editors already come with all of them out of the box. The last one could be controversial, since swap file is designed to help users recover work. In practice though, I find it to be more in the way, due to the additional dialogue that pops up when opening a file that has an existing swap file. The recovery feature itself is also not useful to me, as I more often read logs rather than make edits in those cases.

The next time you find yourself in a similar situation, I recommend you to also try putting those 5 lines into the .vimrc. It could make your Vim experience just a bit better.

Discuss this post on HN.