I've been using vim as my primary editor for the better part of two years now. My .vimrc has gone through a great many changes in that time, but I think I hit a point early on where many of the features and plugins I had chosen were set in stone. It won't be a perfect fit for everyone, but you might find some useful pieces and ideas for your .vimrc.

This is not so much a guide to setting up vim for first time use, as it is a place to explore options and features you may not already be aware of as a newer but experienced user.

What I care about in my vimrc

I value the responsiveness of vim over nearly any other feature. Even in the context of a remote session, I can barely notice the delay in operations which is caused by the network. This is something vim accomplishes without help from the user doing any configuration,

For writing LaTeX docs, I use listings over algorithmic or any other algorithm writing package for LaTeX. It's more convenient to handle syntax and whitespace when writing another language in-line. The usual packages use their own functions to handle whitespace, and everything else; writing another language in-line will render exactly what you type.

Algorithmic for LaTeX

I often see the algorithmic package recommended for demonstrating algorithms inside of LaTeX documents.

Like many LaTeX packages, this comes with its own sizable set of docs made up of a large quantity of commands which I might expect to exist already, but the exact syntax for which are anywhere between mildly frustrating and utterly arcane.

As a less-than-optimal idea of what this might look like in practice, here's a short (and possibly incorrect) algorithm I drafted which takes in a binary tree of integers and a sum, checking for a contiguous, non-backtracking path from any node to another (so only between parent and child nodes, no