[faboo]

Man, I hate incremental and hlsearch :)

I'd agree with you on hidden but... the Vim defaults are (generally) the most vi-like settings, which makes some amount of sense. At the very least it keeps people from squabbling about what should be the default.

OTOH, the default vimrc has a bunch of stuff turned on and tweaked depending on your platform. So that could be a good venue for turning on some of these new, Vim-only features. That may sound like splitting hairs, but I think there's at least a bit of difference between "on by default" and "set to on in the config mkvimrc creates".

[jlgreco]

Eh, my thought is that 'vi'/'vim -C' should remain conservative but that just 'vim' by itself should turn on the sensible stuff. Certainly 'hidden', if not the more cosmetic searching stuff ;).

Some of the defaults are just plain harmful to people trying to get started. 'nohidden' is awful if you try to use buffers without knowing about it, and I don't think I've ever met anyone who wasn't infuriated by 'backspace' defaulting to "".

I'm not so much a fan of the platform tweaks, since you can't expect each platform to make the same ones. If you learn on one and just assume those settings will be the same everywhere, it can be very annoying when you switch to another system only to discover that your .vimrc isn't getting you the same behavior. 'backspace' is a particularly egregious setting this happens for often I find. It would be better if all systems left backspace="", so that everyone knew to add it to their .vimrc's.