[DigitalJack]

I highly don't recommend using a starter kit, and particularly Janus. Janus started out ok but quickly morphed into an amalgamated mess of crap.

The only thing I recommend is Pathogen which keeps addons modular. From there only add things to the baseline as needed.

[dmix]

Agreed I experienced this VIM, emacs...and also surprisingly linux.

I tried switching to Ubuntu from OSX as many times as I tried abandoning Textmate for VIM.

The thing that made me finally keep using Linux was using a very stripped down version called "Arch Linux". This made me appreciate the basic fundamentals of the operating system, with no fluff [1].

It was rough around the edges at first but you learn how to deal with quickly.

I eventually switched to larger and easier-to-use Linux distros like Fedora/Debian. But whenever I run into problems with them, I have the experience to understand/fix it from working with Arch.

I now have no interest in going back to OSX and use VIM obsessively.

Many comedians will say this too: the only way to get motivated to be successful is with your back against the wall. Being partially comfortable makes you complacent.

[1] https://www.archlinux.org/

[wyclif]

You definitely do not want to use Janus right out of the gate, or use a copied ~/.vimrc file. Beginners who do that have no way of knowing where default vim ends and the plugins begin. If you are learning vim I think it's counterproductive to install any plugin unless you know exactly what it does first.

That means incrementally building up your array of useful plugins and not installing them all at once. You want to be very selective about plugins in general anyway, and pay attention to which ones are the most useful to programmers who get a lot done, which will make you want to try them (I'm thinking NERDTree and Ctrl-P here).

[bgar]

I agree so much with this. When someone new to Vim touches it they should start out with a blank slate.

[ethanazir]

and then you start bind and learning key patterns that are sub-optimal

[neeee]

I think vundle is a lot nicer than pathogen. It supports all addons that support pathogen and makes installing and updating them much simpler. https://github.com/gmarik/vundle

[bgar]

I've used both Pathogen and Vundle in the past but recently I started using NeoBundle[1] and like it a lot more. I guess you could say it is a successor to Vundle. It can compile if that's required, and lazily load plugins as needed, among other things.

1: https://github.com/Shougo/neobundle.vim

[tsironakos]

Yeah, Janus is very complicated but maximum-awesome is very simple, just a vimrc and some plugins.