Paul Ericson

While Mac OS X 10.8 ships with vim, it doesn't ship with any vim infrastructure--like a .vimrc file! Here is how to setup the built-in vim to be more useful. Note that these tips are not tested on MacVim which is a standard Mac App that makes vim a GUI app. I have run the equivalent in Windows XP and  7. I so far have not needed this on my Mac. Vim Infrastructure Enter these commands to create a vim infrastructure: touch ~/.vimrc mkdir ~/.vim cd ~/.vim;mkdir backups;mkdir colors;mkdir swaps;mkdir undo; Go to  vimninjas.com  and pick a color theme. I like Disgruntled . Download the color theme file, like disgruntled.vim  and save it in ~./vim/colors . If you get errors about "^M", you'll have to edit the file later and remove these with: :%s/Ctrl+v,<Enter>//g Note: In case you don't recognize the above vim command, you don't type what I show. Instead, you have to hold down the ctrl key, press "v", release both and press "

To display full paths in Finder windows, o pen a Terminal.app window and enter this command:     defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

I've created this blog more for myself than for everyone else. I need a place to record all the modifications I make to my new MacBook Pro and other software configs I might need later. Although hopefully others will find some of my ramblings useful.  I am platform agnostic. I've been doing systems integration work since 1990. I have a great deal of experience integrating Mac, UNIX (RS6000, Sun, SCO), linux and Windows systems. I think they are all awful and it's simply a matter of picking the platform with the least disadvantages for the job at hand. To support this notion I offer the following link .