While other text editors may be available, I prefer to use vi for my editing needs when running on a Unix or Linux box. I get my vi fix on Windows by running the excellent gVim. When I upgraded to a new work laptop running 64bit Windows 7, installing gVim was one of my first tasks.
There are a couple of things that need to be done to make gVim work correctly. The first is a registry change to add an "Edit with VIM" context menu item in Explorer. The following is the contents of a gvim.reg file I ran to add this functionality:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\Edit with Vim]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\Edit with Vim\command]
@="C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Vim\\vim72\\gvim.exe \"%1\""
The second thing to do is add some customisation. gVim can use a _vimrc file (the underscore is necessary at the start) and uses the HOME variable to locate it. I setup a HOME variable that was pointing to "%USERPROFILE%" (c:\users\jr) and created a text file in %HOME% with my desired settings:
colorscheme slate
set guifont=Lucida\ Console
set columns=132
set lines=50
set nobackup
set number
This doesn't do much apart from set a nice colour scheme, font, window size, prevents backup files being created whenever a file is edited, and turns on line numbers. There are hundreds of options that power users can add to customise gVim, but it's a good start.
With the final edition of adding the gVim icon to my task bar, I now have a comfortable working environment.
