A few simple but useful .vimrc configs

I am an avid user of vim, starting from coding to writing papers in tex. I remember I got introduced to vim sometime during undergrad, and it was not very long before I switched to it from emacs. I guess I am one of those people now who believes that 'real' computer scientists use vim! Enough of retrospection, and back to the purpose of this post.

I have a few simple things set up in my .vimrc file that I have found to be quite useful over time, and thought others might just find it handy.

Useful vim 1: If you have been a computer science major as an undergrad, then the 80 character limit must have been ingrained into you. I have a very simple highlighter in my .vimrc that tells me when I am crossing over my 80 character limit per line. You can add this simple piece in your .vimrc.

match ErrorMsg '\%>80v.\+'

Useful vim 2: I have mapped keys for commenting /un-commenting blocks of code in vim in visual mode. You can set different key mappings for the different programming languages that you use. For example, here is my mapping for C++

map ,z :s/^/\/\/<TAB>/<CR>
map ,a :s/\/\/<TAB>/<CR>

Similarly for Matlab,

map ,c :s/^/%%<TAB>/<CR>
map ,d :s/%%<TAB>/<CR>

Useful vim 3: If you are like me who prefers tex to write things up, then setting up a Makefile to compile the tex from vim is a useful tool. The primary motivation for this setup is that I am too lazy to switch between terminals to compile the tex. And why should I do that when I can set up my editor. In your .vimrc, you add the following:

autocmd BufWritePost,FileWritePost *.tex !make

This basically calls make from vim when you save your tex (notice the *.tex). A very simple and generic Makefile to go with this will look something like

file.pdf: file.tex
  pdflatex file.tex
  bibtex file.aux
  pdflatex file.tex
  pdflatex file.tex

Hope these very basic vim setups will be of use.