vimrc tips

On Debian-family systems, vim.tiny may be providing the vim command, through the alternatives system. If I bring in my dotfiles and haven’t installed a full vim package yet, such as vim-gtk3, then dozens of errors might show up.  vim.tiny really does not support many features.

Other times, I run gvim -ZR for quickly checking some code, to get read-only restricted mode.  In that case, anything that wants to run a shell command will fail.  Restricted mode is also a signal that I don’t trust the files I’m viewing, so I don’t want to process their modelines at all.

To deal with these scenarios, my vimrc is shaped like this (line count heavily reduced for illustration):

set nocompatible ruler laststatus=2 nomodeline modelines=2
if has('eval')
    call plug#begin('~/.vim/plugged')
    try
        call system('true')
        Plug 'dense-analysis/ale'
        Plug 'mhinz/vim-signify' | set updatetime=150
        Plug 'pskpatil/vim-securemodelines'
    catch /E145/
    endtry
    Plug 'editorconfig/editorconfig-vim'
    Plug 'luochen1990/rainbow'
    Plug 'tpope/vim-sensible'
    Plug 'sapphirecat/garden-vim'
    Plug 'ekalinin/Dockerfile.vim', { 'for': 'Dockerfile' }
    Plug 'rhysd/vim-gfm-syntax', { 'for': 'md' }
    Plug 'wgwoods/vim-systemd-syntax', { 'for': 'service' }
    call plug#end()
    if !has('gui_running') && exists('&termguicolors')
        set termguicolors
    endif
    let g:rainbow_active=1
    colorscheme garden
endif

We start off with the universally-supported settings.  Although I use the abbreviated forms in the editor, my vimrc has the full spelling, for self-documentation.

Next is the feature detection of if has('eval') … endif.  This ensures that vim.tiny doesn’t process the block.  Sadly, inverting the test and using the finish command inside didn’t work.

If we have full vim, we start loading plugins, with a try-catch for restricted mode.  If we can’t run the true shell command, due to E145, we cancel the error and proceed without that subset of non-restricted plugins.  Otherwise, ALE and signify would load in restricted mode, but throw errors as soon as we opened files.

After that, it’s pretty straightforward; we’re running in a full vim, loading things that can run in restricted mode.  When the plugins are over, we finish by configuring and activating the ones that need it.