Vim tip 32: text and indent settings

Here are some text and indent Vim settings that you can put in the vimrc file to customize your editor. See :h options.txt for complete reference.

filetype plugin indent on enables loading of plugin and indent files
- these files become active based on the type of the file to influence syntax highlighting, indentation, etc
- :echo $VIMRUNTIME gives your installation directory (indent and plugin directories would be present in this path)
- see :h vimrc-filetype, :h :filetype-overview and :h filetype.txt for more details
set autoindent copy indent from the current line when starting a new line
- useful for files not affected by indent setting
- see also :h smartindent
set textwidth=80 guideline for Vim to automatically move to a new line with 80 characters as the limit
- white space is used to break lines, so a line can still be greater than the limit if there's no white space
- default is 0 which disables this setting
set colorcolumn=80 create a highlighted vertical bar at column number 80
- use highlight ColorColumn setting to customize the color for this vertical bar
- see vi.stackexchange: Keeping lines to less than 80 characters for more details
set shiftwidth=4 number of spaces to use for indentation (default is 8)
set tabstop=4 width for the tab character (default is 8)
set expandtab use spaces for tab expansion
set cursorline highlight the line containing the cursor

Video demo: