Vim, its defaults, and the problem this presents sysadmins

October 4, 2019

One of Vim's many options is 'hidden', which may be off or on. The real thing that it does, behind the thicket of technical description, is that hidden controls whether or not you can casually move away from a modified Vim buffer to another one. In most editors this isn't even an option and you always can (you'll get prompted if you try to exit with unsaved changes). In Vim, for historical reasons, this is an option and for further historical reasons it defaults to 'off'.

(The historical reasons are that it wasn't an option in the original BSD vi, which behaved as if hidden was always off. Vim cares a fair bit about compatibility back to historical vi.)

The default of hidden being off gets in the way of doing certain sorts of things in Vim, like making changes to multiple files at once, and it's also at odds with what I want and how I like to work in my editors. So the obvious thing for me to do would be to add 'set hidden' to my .vimrc and move on. However, there is a problem with that, or rather two problems, because I use Vim partly as a sysadmin's editor. By that I mean that I use vi(m) from several different accounts (including the root account) and on many different machines, not all of which have a shared home directory even for my own account (and root always has a local home directory).

In order for 'set hidden' to be useful to me, it needs to be quite pervasive; it needs to work pretty much everywhere I use vim. Otherwise I will periodically trip over situations where it doesn't work, which means that I'll always have to remember the workarounds (and ideally practice them). As a non-default setting, this is at least difficult (although not completely impossible, since we already have an install framework that puts various things into place on all standard machines).

This is why what programs have as defaults matters a lot to sysadmins, in a way that they don't to people who only use one or a few environments on a regular basis. Defaults are all that we can count on everywhere, and our lives are easier if we work within them (we have less to remember, less to customize on as many systems as possible as early as possible, and so on). My life would be a bit easier if Vim had decided that its default was to have hidden on.

PS: The other thing about defaults is that going with the defaults is the course of least discussion in the case of setups used by multiple people, which is an extremely common case for the root account.

Sidebar: The practical flies in my nice theoretical entry

My entry is the theory, but once I actually looked at things it turns out to be not so neat in practice. First off, my own personal .vimrc turns out to already turn on hidden, due to me following the setup guide from Aristotle Pagaltzis' vim-buftabline package. Second, we already install a customized .vimrc in the root account in our standard Ubuntu installs, and reading the comments in it makes it clear that I wrote it. I could probably add 'set hidden' to this and re-deploy it without any objections from my co-workers, and this would cover almost all of the cases that matter to me in practice.

Written on 04 October 2019.
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Last modified: Fri Oct 4 22:34:56 2019
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