I'm opening this issue to consolidate the discussions in #276, #1664, #1667, #2071 and elsewhere, and to have a place to track progress on the change of default settings.

Notes

RULE 1 of the default club: These defaults should be adjusted considering the most common use cases for nvim.

RULE 2 of the default club: If possible, changes to the defaults should be available in the scenario where there is no $VIMRUNTIME available (e.g., the nvim executable was copied over to a remote server).

PRs opened for this must have options: as a prefix.

There must be a unequivocal argument in favor of changing the defaults, or to reject the proposed changes.

@justinmk has stressed the need to keep the set -& and set -&vim idioms behaving as they do now (which means the approach in #1667 is not viable) (see #1664 (comment), #1667 (comment)) (There's been some discussion on whether it's worth it to keep the set-& idiom, but that is lower priority).

The vi defaults are not to be changed or removed (see #1667 (comment)). This means that if the option uses the P_VI_DEF flag, you'll have to change it to P_VIM and change the default for vim only. E.g.:

  {"wildmode",    "wim",  P_STRING|P_VI_DEF|P_COMMA|P_NODUP,
   (char_u *)&p_wim, PV_NONE,
   {(char_u *)"full", (char_u *)0L} SCRIPTID_INIT},

becomes

  {"wildmode",    "wim",  P_STRING|P_VIM|P_COMMA|P_NODUP,
   (char_u *)&p_wim, PV_NONE,
   {(char_u *)"full", (char_u *)"list:longest,full"} SCRIPTID_INIT},

Changing some of these settings will cause the tests to behave differently, so keep it in mind when working on this.

Also keep in mind you'll need to update vim_diff.txt as well.

These changes are not a priority, and could be introduced after the first release.

New defaults and progress

(These were the settings I had in #1667, which are based on sensible.vim and the discussions in #276. Feel free to comment on them).

Some mappings have been proposed too:

Other tasks

• Update runtime/vimrc_example.vim