[vox-tech] vim annoyance in new Ubuntu Edgy installation

[Troy Arnold]

On Sun, Mar 18, 2007 at 10:24:43AM -0700, hajhouse wrote:
> I have a new installation of Ubuntu Edgy whose provided Vim package has
> some very annoying problems that make it nearly unusable. I have copied
> over my old /etc/vim/ and ~/.vimrc unchanged.
> 
> - folds are on with pieces of most kinds of files (conffiles, mail)
>   being hidden by default. I need to manually set foldmethod=marker or
>   foldlevel=10 to unhide everything. Adding either of those commands to
>   my vimrc had no apparent effect.
> 
> - syntax highlighting fails silently
> 
> - weird abbreviation expansions occur when I typ certain texts
> 
> Has anyone else experienced anything like this? What is really weird is
> that vim works fine on another Ubuntu Edgy system, installed about a
> month ago.

I use vim on literally dozens of *buntu machines and haven't experienced
anything like this.  In general though, I don't touch the system wide stuff
and instead append a local path to $VIMRUNTIME.

A shotgun approach for things to try:
Debug mode:
vim -D

from within vim, show all non-default options:
:set

:help set
Might also provide some clues.

Is there anything in either the system-wide or your personal vim "after"
directories?

How does vim behave without your personal /etc/vim and ~/.vim* ?

I do understand your pain, as I've been struggling recently with some odd
termcap behaviour on an old RHEL install.  A Vim that doesn't behave as
one expects it to is a frustrating tool.

-t