Insert a tab character in vim when expand tabs is on

I have vim set-up to use spaces in place of tabs. Sometimes you need to use an actual tab e.g. editing a Makefile. Now whilst it's possible to change settings so that tabs are used for specific files, a quick tip to remember is to simply type in insert…

Updating Vim to Use Plugins From Branches

I decided the other evening that I should refresh my vim plugins to pick up any updates that have landed since the last time I updated them. The downside is that every time I want to do this, I have the pain of manually re-installing the updated files into the…

vim: automatically highlight long lines

This .vimrc snippet highlights lines when you exceed 77 columns - this is especially useful if you are trying to adhere to PEP8 with Python development. The if statement makes this work for older vims as well as more recent versions which is handy if you put your .vimrc on…

Vim: Setting the colorscheme Doesn't Work

If you've found a fancy colorscheme for vim and you want to try it out, once you've saved the colorscheme file to ~/.vim/colors you can enable the theme with the following in a vim session's command mode: :colorscheme fruity If you want the colorscheme to be permanent then you…