I've used the vi text editor for many years; (at least long enough to know that it's pronounced vie and not vee-eye!). Over those years my level of expertise has varied somewhat - I'm fairly sure I've learned some commands and forgotten them several times over. Anyway - recently (i.e. in the last year or so), I've put some more effort in to reacquainting myself with some of its many joys. In practice, of course, I really mean vim: I'd be hard-pressed to remember the last time I saw vi in its "good-old-fashioned" form (does one say Plain-old-vi?) As most of my work is on Windows systems, this means using gVim.

Of the many improvements that vim has over vi, syntax highlighting is one of my favourites. The trouble is, one of my commonest use-cases for editing text files on Windows systems is .NET configuration files. Because these have a file extension of .config, they aren't recognised by default as XML files, and I end up going through the rigmarole of selecting one menu option to get a choice of file types added to the menus, and then locating XML among those newly added options to get highlighting to come on. Well there had to be a better way, and of course there was. What you have to do is this:

• Locate your vi directory (on the system I was working on this evening, it's "C:\Program Files (x86)\Vim\"
• Having found this directory, locate or create C:\Program Files (x86)\Vim\vimfiles\ftdetect
• In ftdetect, create a file called config.vim with the following contents:

au BufRead,BufNewFile *.config     set filetype=xml

I have Windows configured to use vi as the default editor for .config files, so now with this in place, all I have to do is double-click on the file and it opens with XML syntax-highlighting enabled. Great stuff!