Much to my displeasure, Ubuntu seems to have been steadily making the version of vim that they ship more and more superintelligent. I do not want a superintelligent vi ; in fact, superintelligence is a net negative in vim , because unlike with GNU Emacs it is almost always wrong . So, unlike the first set of vim options , these are negative options that I need, things that turn off settings.

So far, I have wound up with:

set formatoptions=l

Turns off automatic line wrapping. Since vi is my sysadmin's editor and sysadmins edit configuration files a lot, automatic line wrapping is anti-feature.

(I hate it in Emacs too, when it happens.)

let loaded_matchparen = 1

Turns off blinking matched delimeters, like () and [] and so on. I find this irritating and distracting.

filetype plugin off

This turns off all sorts of superintelligent automatic formatting that I aggressively don't want.

(At some point I may look into the best way to fix the line ending issue , but I haven't been annoyed enough yet.)

Some reading in the vim help files suggests that ' set paste ' will also do a lot to turn off all of the superintelligence that I so dislike. Using Ubuntu's 'tiny' version of vim also goes a long way to disabling various things I don't like, but it has the side effect of making vim not like the latter two .vimrc settings here (and it's not something that I can turn on globally on our systems and so have all the time, no matter what environment or UID I am at the moment).

All in all, I really wish vim had a mode where it just settled for being a better vi instead of trying to be a bad imitation of GNU Emacs. As before , if I want GNU Emacs, I know where to find it.