For many years, my favourite text editor has been Vim. I’ve made a decent amount of use of Emacs (the standard in one of my jobs and, more widely, the one that has its bindings built as a default into Bash) and I’m happy to use something basic, like Windows Notepad, in a push but Vim is the one I’d choose to use for pretty much any text-based task and certainly for any involving heavy lifting.

The gripe I’ve had while using it on my Windows systems is that the standard version didn’t seem to honour common Windows shortcuts, like Ctrl-C for copy and Ctrl-V for paste. However, I noticed that one of the customers I had for a Windows 11 upgrade in my work at the University had noted gVim as an essential piece of software. While running through the standard checks I had a brief chat about it and he enlightened me about two lines to insert in my .vimrc file:

source $VIMRUNTIME/mswin.vim
behave mswin

That was the first thing I tried when I got home and, on a small amount of testing, it seems to achieve exactly what I was after. I’m aware that this will all seem like a foreign language to many of my readers but future-me is going to love it when I try to recall the trick on a new system and it is just possible that it might help someone else discover the trick through random searching as I have a suspicion that the intersection of Vim users and Windows users is fairly small and I hadn’t turned up the information myself in previous searches.