Would like to set 'guitablabel' from ~/.vim/pack/mypackage

[mikesep]

First of all, huge thanks to the maintainers of MacVim for all the great work that you do! 😃

In #635, the team merged, discussed, and then reverted (via #637) a change to make the macvim base gvimrc allow users to override 'guitablabel' in other places besides their .gvimrc.

@chdiza said:

I don't see the point of this unless one is desperately trying to avoid needing to have a ~/.gvimrc in the first place. If you already have a ~/.gvimrc, there is no reason not to put your guitablabel setting in it, and there is no reason to put that setting in ~/.vimrc.

I am in fact someone who is trying to avoid needing a ~/.vimrc or ~/.gvimrc. My personal configurations are stored in a vim package (e.g. ~/.vim/pack/mypackage) that contains my settings as well as the plugins I use.

Because vim packages are loaded in step 4 of initialization, and GUI initialization happens in step 8, the MacVim base gvimrc overrides the 'guitablabel' setting from my package.

Would you reconsider making the MacVim gvimrc more permissive to allow this type of configuration? It didn't seem like there were any drawbacks mentioned in #635.

/cc @ychin @chdiza @splhack from the original PR.

[chdiza]

I am in fact someone who is trying to avoid needing a ~/.vimrc or ~/.gvimrc. My personal configurations are stored in a vim package

I'm not sure that MacVim should be catering to this extremely niche case.

At any rate, wouldn't it work if you put an autocmd somewhere in the pack, tied to GuiEnter, that sets &guitablabel?

[mikesep]

It would work to use an autocmd, though I've tried to stay away from them where possible because I've found them hard to debug.

I personally don't feel that MacVim should be taking a strong stance on where I put my configuration settings. You are right that .gvimrc exists to put GUI-specific settings, but has("gui_running") exists so that I can do things conditionally. I think there's a good practice to putting related settings together. If I were customizing my tab line for vim for both terminal and GUI modes, I'd want to put that setting together, either in my .vimrc or a package file or a plugin or wherever. I find it cumbersome to always be comparing a .vimrc against a .gvimrc to see whether a setting was overridden later.

Nearly everything else in MacVim's base gvimrc has a way to be skipped/enabled: macvim_skip_colorscheme, macvim_skip_cmd_opt_movement, macvim_hig_shift_movement. Is it a burden to wrap the guitablabel line in an if exists check? I wouldn't think it would make testing or maintenance more difficult, but I might be missing something.

[ychin]

I was thinking more about it, and yes while GUI configs "should" be placed in .gvimrc it does seem odd that we would impose such a strong restriction on MacVim's side, especially Vim itself doesn't (this only happens because MacVim has its own gvimrc that it sources). I think there's a good point to be made such that MacVim should aim to be as un-intrusive a change to a Vim user as humanly possible and this override isn't respecting that. Let me see if I could go back to fix that.

[ychin]

I have filed PR #903 which will fix this. This is a simple fix and while a little messy will do the right thing in respecting the user's preferences and I don't think anyone who cares will be negatively affected by this.

I'm generally a little dissatisfied with how MacVim's gvimrc works as it's an extra configuration file that gets injected into the configuration chain. I think other settings in src/MacVim/gvimrc like printexpr probably should be done as a native default in the C code (this way you could do something like set printexpr& in MacVim and it will work properly) but that's outside the scope of particular issue.

[mikesep]

Thanks @ychin! My quick tests of #903 look good on my machine.