I also learned with the emacs and switched over to vim a year ago.

Short summary: emacs is the best for LaTeX editing (using AUCTeX and RefTeX) but everywhere else, I do prefer vim – not at least because I hate LISP :-)

and so on. you’ll probably need to have
filetype on
filetype indent on
filetype plugin on

for this to work. btw, you can also have settings based on filename:
autocmd BufRead admin.log* set expandtab

for having multiple open files, tabs are really useful (:tabnew file). you can try this:
https://wiki.ncl.cs.columbia.edu/wiki/index.php/Vim_awesomeness#using_tabs
for a way to make them look nice (there may be a better way now, i haven’t checked in a while)

Editing other files: do “:help buffers”, there’s an option to keep old buffers around at which point “:e” will be what you want. Add the BufferExplorer plugin from vim.org, and you’ll have a lean, mean editing machine (BufferExplorer gives you a list of open buffers when you hit \be).

In summary though, this command enables filetype detection of indentation and plugins:

filetype plugin indent on

Then, you can create the following directory structure in your $HOME:

.vim/indent/
.vim/ftplugin/

Then say you wanted to tweak the indentation rules used for shell scripting, you would drop a file called ‘sh.vim’ in the indentation directory. Likewise, if you had some specific feature of vim you wanted enable only when editing sh files, you could add ‘sh.vim’ to the ftplugin directory.

Pete

[url]http://www.vi-improved.org/tutorial.php[/url]

:set noai
:set nocin
:set nosi

and be sure to read
:help ai
:help cin
:help ‘si’

# Be able to edit another file without closing or saving the first (:e doesn’t seem to do what I want)

If you mean that you want to forfeit all your changes and start editing another file, try

:e!

If you want to split the window and edit the files in parallel, try

:sp
or
:vert sp

When you start feeling comfortable, you might want to look at this page: , these tips are great, even for hardcore vimmers.

(and be sure to take a look at the corresponding help pages, there are lots of useful things you might want to know)

For the syntax highlight for example for python, put the following in hgrc:
au FileType python set syntax=off

And not sure for mercurial see at:
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1293

Generically, :set syntax and :set syntax=off. You can set specific languages such as :set syntax=python. You probably know this though, and I’m afraid I cannot be of much help on how to do a set of actions based on filetype.

To turn off auto indent, just :set noai. Again, not sure on how to have preset contexts based on filetypes.

> Be able to edit another file without closing or saving the first (:e doesn’t seem to do what I want)

:split file.c will split the screen horizontally so you can look and edit multiple files at once. Use CTRL+W W to switch between buffers. You can also do a vertical split with :vert split otherfile.c.

> Integrate it with Mercurial and Darcs

I set my merge to vimdiff in .hgrc. As for ChangeLog’s, I usually just add a new date line and :r! hg st to enter the status of my mercurial branch.

Cheers, and good luck!

Do you want :new instead of :e?

Hope that helps

Helmut