This is helpful, particularly the resources listed, but I would advise against using someone else's config starting out. Continually editing my own .vimrc for the first few months was a big part of learning. If you use someone else's dotfiles right from the start, there's a good chance you'll end up believing some behaviour is default when it really isn't, and that's going to mess you up.
I agree with this very strongly. The first time I tried to learn VIM, I installed janus [1], and ended up with this monstrous, complicated system with a million plugins that I didn't understand. The mouse sort of worked, but not the way I expected it to.
I'm now sort-of trying to learn VIM again. My vimrc has about 10-15 lines in it, and I know what each one does. I have a color scheme installed, but no other plugins.
How I boosted my Vim [2] has been helpful to me in adding things to my vimrc, because Vincent Driessen is, as always, clear-minded and erudite in his description of what things do, and has good taste on a basic setup that will make sense to the modern developer. Again though, I haven't blindly pasted in all his stuff—instead, when I feel some friction with my Vim settings, I head to that article and see if there's a tweak he's listed that I can use.
Agreed. There's a great post Vim: revisited with a minimal .vimrc file that I used after having to start over learning Vim because of using someone else's .vimrc I didn't need or fully understand: http://mislav.uniqpath.com/2011/12/vim-revisited/
Well, when I started using Emacs, I copied a lot of snippets of code which I didn't understand, and it didn't hamper my learning process. Quite the contrary, it sped it up because I was able to override some annoying behaviors before learning how to do it.
That was a huge mistake for me when first learning vim. If you start with someone else's .vimrc, you will run into a lot more "FML, what is going on" experiences that you should.
