How easy it is to forget the pains that come along with trying to DIY everything.
Just when I thought I'd started to wrap my head around some of the finer points of configuring Vim just the way I like it, I was hit with a painful roadblock. While trying to write a Python script, I noticed that despite the syntax highlighting working as expected, nothing I do could get the indentation right. Unfortunately indentation is far from superficial in Python meaning I would have to install some new plugin to autoformat things and fix whatever was broken — not exactly how I wanted to spend my Sunday.
Flash forward two hours later and it turns out all of this fuss was due
to a buggy if statement in my .vimrc, bleh. Did I learn
some new things? Yes, I suppose I now have a better appreciation for how
Vim handles filetypes and indentation. But the real lesson here was one
high school teachers tried to hammer home a long time ago, don't copy
random (.vimrc) files from the interwebs without knowing what they're
doing. A reminder for future me that it's better to focus on
understanding the basics instead of FOMOing about the fancy stuff.