Yes, it is possible. You can load menu.vim
(the default gvim menu definitions), or you can just start from scratch and create your own, then access them through :emenu
. This doesn't give you nano-like always-visible menus, though; it gives you the ability to navigate menus using command-line tab completion.
If the user doesn't have a vimrc, you'll want to start by disabling vi compatibility:
:set nocompatible
Enable smart command line completion on <Tab>
(enable listing all possible choices, and navigating the results with <Up>
, <Down>
, <Left>
, <Right>
, and <Enter>
):
:set wildmenu
Make repeated presses cycle between all matching choices:
:set wildmode=full
Load the default menus (this would happen automatically in gvim, but not in terminal vim):
:source $VIMRUNTIME/menu.vim
After those four commands, you can manually trigger menu completion by invoking tab completion on the :emenu
command, by doing :emenu<space><tab>
You can navigate the results using the tab key and the arrow keys, and the enter key (it both expands submenus and selects items). You can then make that more convenient by going a step further, and binding a mapping to pop up the menu without having to type :emenu
every time:
Make Ctrl-Z in a mapping act like pressing <Tab>
interactively on the command line:
:set wildcharm=<C-Z>
And make a binding that automatically invokes :emenu
completion for you:
:map <F4> :emenu <C-Z>
You can add your .vim
runtimepath on top of your .vimrc
file:
:set runtimepath=/home/b/.vim,$VIMRUNTIME
This makes vim search for plugins, colors etc. in /home/b/.vim
first and then in the standard location (for example /usr/share/vim/vim72/
in debian squeeze).
I'm using this together with an alias vim='vim -u /home/b/.vimrc'
.
Best Answer
Each of you can store your config files in different directories.
Then make an alias in roots ~/.bashrc to use the different configs.
If you're having issues loading the plugins, make sure that your references in your .vimrc files don't use $HOME or ~/ to reference any files because when root tries to read them it will look in /root/path/to/file