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Editing Plain Text Files with VIM

   9 February 2007, mid-morning

I use VIM when programming. It’s a text editor, originally for UNIX systems, that is popular amongst programmers. It is famous for its arcane and terse interface. Although meant for working with source code, it works quite well for editing plain old text files, but there are a couple format options you should turn on to make VIM work smarter. :set fo=twan1 will turn on a few useful format options: auto-wrap text to the textwidth, reformat paragraphs when they are changed, and recognize numbered lists. (You will need to turn on autoindent for the numbered list formatting to work properly.) Doing this will make editing README files in VIM a million times easier.

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