The LFS book installs vim as its editor. At this point we should state that there are a lot of different editors out there including emacs, nano, joe and many more. Anyone who has been around the Internet (especially usenet) for a short time will certainly have observed at least one flame war, usually involving vim and emacs users! The LFS book gives a basic vimrc file. Here, we attempt to enhance this file. At startup, vim reads /etc/vimrc and ~/.vimrc (i.e., the global vimrc and the user-specific one.). Note that this is only true if you compiled vim using LFS-3.1 onwards. Prior to this, the global vimrc was /usr/share/vim/vimrc. Here is an example of a slightly expanded vimrc: " Begin .vimrc set nocompatible set bs=2 set columns=80 set background=dark set tabstop=8 set wrapmargin=8 set nobk syntax on set ruler set noexpandtab " End .vimrc A FAQ on the lfs lists regards the comment tags in vimrc. Note that they are " instead of the more usual # or //. This is correct, the syntax for vimrc is slightly unusual. We'll run through a quick explanation of what each of the options in this example file means here: set nocompatible : This option stops vim from behaving in a strongly vi-compatible way. It should be at the start of any vimrc file as it can affect lots of other options which you may want to override. set bs=2 : This influences the behaviour of the backspace option. It is fairly complex so see :help 'bs' for more details. set columns=80 : This simply sets the number of columns used on the screen. set background=dark : This tells vim to use colours which look good on a dark background. set tabstop=8 : The number of spaces which a tabstop takes. set wrapmargin=8 : This is the number of characters from the right window border where wrapping starts. set nobk : This stops vim from creating a backup before overwriting a file. syntax on : Enables vim's syntax highlighting. set ruler : This makes vim show the current row and column at the bottom right of the screen. set noexpandtab : This makes vim insert tabs as tab characters instead of as a set of spaces. More information on the many vim options can be found by reading the help inside vim itself. Do this by typing :help in vim to get the general help, or by typing :help usr_toc.txt to view the User Manual Table of Contents.