wezm.net/v1/content/technical/2008/09/pimping-vim-on-windows.html

Following Nick Kreeger's <a href="http://nkreeger.com/2008/09/macvim-ftw.html">handy post</a> on tweaking MacVim on Mac OS X I applied some of the tips to GVim under Windows to make it a little easier on the eye. The following settings are placed in your _vimrc/.vimrc file.

First up is a change of font. With the introduction of Windows Vista Microsoft had a <a href="http://www.officeformac.com/blog/Brave-New-Fonts">set of new standard fonts</a> created. These also ship with the latest versions of Office. The Consolas monospaced font makes a good programmers font so I use this as the font when running under Windows. I've also set the size to be relatively small.

<pre>if has("gui_win32")
    :set guifont=Consolas:h8,<a href="http://www.proggyfonts.com/index.php?menu=download">ProggyTiny</a>:h8,Luxi_Mono:h12:cANSI
endif</pre>

<!--more-->Next up set the window to start tall and a little wider than normal:

    set columns=90 lines=65

I share my vim config with Cygwin and Windows native vim. In order to get the Windows version to pick up the UNIX plugins etc in the .vim I include the following:

    " Make Windows use my UNIX vimfiles
    if has("win32")
        set runtimepath=$HOME/.vim,$HOME/vimfiles,$VIM/vimfiles,$VIMRUNTIME,$VIM/vimfiles/after,$HOME/vimfiles/after
    endif

Turn on a custom status line which includes the file name, file type, modified and read only status, line and column numbers and the percentage through the file.

    set laststatus=2
    set statusline=%&lt;%f\ %m%a%=%([%R%H%Y]%)\ %-19(%3l\ of\ %L,%c%)%P
    set showcmd

Along the lines of what Nick did I turned line numbers on and toned the colour down a bit:

    colorscheme koehler
    hi LineNr guifg=#666666
    set number

So what does it all like in the end? Still not as good as MacVim but not too bad (click for full size version, scaled version looks a bit average):

<a href="/images/2008/09/windows-gvim.png"><img src="/images/2008/09/windows-gvim.png" alt="Screenshot of GVim on Windows after customisation" title="Customised GVim" width="500" height="847" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-67" /></a>