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ShowHN: Scraped 800 .vimrc files from github, analyzed for fun

by AlexMcP on 10/2/12, 3:58 AM with 17 comments

• by malkia on 10/2/12, 5:40 AM

  Would love to see something similar for "emacs"

  I just learned something new for example today - using the ".dir-locals.el" to specify per-directory variables :)

  I want to learn vi/vim, but spent already so much time learning emacs (and still feeling baby in it... which is good!)

• by recoil on 10/2/12, 5:33 AM

  It's interesting that "set autoindent" is so common. I replaced this with "filetype indent on" some years ago, since I'd rather have language-sensitive indentation.

• by chrismorgan on 10/2/12, 6:00 AM

  Normalisation of settings would be a very good thing to do. 'ruler' and 'ru', 'autoindent' and 'ai', 'etc.' and 'et cetera'.

• by wamatt on 10/3/12, 1:53 AM

  Very cool project, thanks for sharing! :)

  What could be interesting addition, would be to see how these change over time, ie .vimrc trends.

  I had a similar idea for analyzing dotfiles stats, which was subsequently filed in evernote as a 'yet-another-hack-i-would-like-to-do-someday-but-realistically-probably-will-not' ;)

• by AlexMcP on 10/2/12, 3:59 AM

  Did this for fun mostly to test out casper.js (it's nice!)

  I'd welcome any feedback on how to better present interesting data, or answer any questions. Thanks!

• by johncoltrane on 10/2/12, 7:15 AM

  What a surprise: 574/800 useless set nocompatible. Cargo cult for the win!