I set all 376 Vim options and I'm still a fool

Summary

I set all 376 Vim options and I'm still a foolI set all of Vim’s configuration options. I still feel far from mastery.First impressions of Vim: wowI first saw someone use Vim during an internship in 2012.I had been coding for many years and I fancied myself pretty good at shortcuts, but I was quickly humbled. I watched in awe as experienced users zipped around the code. A single keystroke could move the cursor halfway across the file to exactly the right spot. Code was ripped apart and reshaped like putty.“Wow,” I thought to myself, and probably said out loud.13 years later, still clumsyI vowed to master this editor but I was slow. When I wasn’t accidentally opening some unknown menu, I was taking an uneconomical path through the code. I pressed j twenty times instead of running 20j, or manually deleted code inside parenthesis instead of running di(. Sometimes I’d open another text editor to give my mind a break from all the key bindings!Fast-forward to 2025. After tons of practice, I felt much more capable. Code did feel more like putty. I was working closer to the speed of thought. I could get code where I wanted much more quickly. 13 years of practice paid off!But Vim still felt clumsy. I was still accidentally opening menus I didn’t recognize. I would do silly things like converting the whole file to lowercase, or trigger some scary error message. “Surely I shouldn’t be making these mistakes,” I thought. What could be done to finally master this editor?My goal: set every Vim optionThat desire for expertise led me on a quest to set all of Vim’s options. I would make an informed decision about all 376 of Vim’s settings and drop them in my .vimrc. In other words, I wanted to 100% Vim.Surely, setting every Vim option would make me the fluent expert I wanted to be…right?I pored over every single Vim option and made a decision. What did the option do, and what did I want it to be set to? My goal was to be thorough; leave no stone unturned. I only set the option a...