Proper configuration

It’s not obvious to rookies, that Vim is a lot more pleasant to work after a few tweaks in default configuration.

This can be easily done from the .vimrc file in your home directory (it may not exist, so you’d have to create it). The bare minimum that is usually recommended is:

expandtab ts=2 sw=2
set number
syntax on

Let’s break it down and explain it line by line:

expandtab ts=2 sw=2

This is a combo of three settings:

• expandtab will make the “tab” key input spaces instead of a tab character.
• ts=2 (short for tabstop) defines how much spaces a single tab character is.
• sw=2 (short for shiftwidth) specifies indentation width.

Why is this important? According to the specification, YAML files have to be indented with spaces. If we mix tab characters and spaces in YAML files, Kubernetes will return an error.

Such mistakes are really hard to spot, so if we forgot about the expandtab setting and want to find a problem, we can use the set line setting, which will show all special characters. You can also use :retab command to replace all tab characters with spaces.

set number

Line numbers are very useful. Both to quickly find a mistake from a Kubernetes error message, as well as to quickly navigate. If we want to quickly jump to line 42, we just need to use the command :42.

The caveat is, that if you would want to copy text with your mouse, the line numbers would be copied as well. Fortunately, we can just temporarily turn the line numbers off with set nonumber

syntax on

This setting makes sure, that the syntax highlighting is enabled. This obviously isn’t mandatory, but I find it really helpful.

Searching

To search a specific expression, use /. For example: /image will search for the “image” string. You can use regex as well.

Indenting

To indent the line we use >>.

We can select a block of code with visual select with v (or Shift-V for selecting whole lines).

You can repeat indentation, by doing 3>> (which will indent selected lines 3 times). Unfortunately, after doing the indent, the selection will disappear, so we can’t keep the lines selected and indent them until we see that we’re finished. What we can do is to repeat the indent command by pressing the comma key ..

Remap caps-lock to Esc

It may seem inconvenient to constantly reach out to Esc button to exit the insert mode. However, remapping the caps lock button to act as a Escape has literally changed my life for better. Not only I don’t accidentally turn in on, but it’s way easier to press Escape button now.

On macOS, this can be set from the system preferences, so there is no need to use external tools.