I usually put these 23 lines in a blank ~/.vimrc:

syntax on
colorscheme murphy
set textwidth=72
set tabstop=4
set shiftwidth=0
set expandtab
set autoindent
set number
set hlsearch
set incsearch
set showcmd
set hidden
set ruler
set autochdir
set nojoinspaces
set wildmenu
set listchars=eol:$,tab:>-,nbsp:~,trail:~
set guioptions=ic
autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead *.md set filetype=markdown
autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead *.html,*.css,*.js,*.json,*.yml,*.yaml setlocal tabstop=2
autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead *.go,Makefile* setlocal tabstop=8 noexpandtab
autocmd BufWinEnter * syntax keyword Todo TODO
autocmd BufWinEnter * syntax match Error /\s\+$/

My ~/.vimrc on my home system that I use for day-to-day activities is a little larger. Here is a copy of it: github.com/susam/dotfiles - vimrc.

On similar lines, I recently shared a small 50 line ~/.emacs helpful for quickly setting up a Common Lisp development environment here: github.com/susam/emacs4cl.

1. smartcase is IMHO better than ignorecase
2. numbers slow Vim, I prefer ruler as is less obstructive
3. With NeoVim lines 1, 3, 5 are not needed, number 2 is IMHO better with smartcase and I do not like line 4

I had to do the same thing for an algorithmics exam at university, I came up with

""" Condensed vimrc for exams
syntax on
set ai ts=4 sw=4 et nowrap number relativenumber hlsearch incsearch
color darkblue

The problems were ACM-style competitive programming problems, and had to be solved in C++. You could use whatever was preinstalled in their custom Fedora exam environment (they even had Eclipse and VSCode, however many students complained that they were atrociously slow on the thin clients we had). I also remember my C++ template:

#include<iostream>
#include<bits/stdc++.h>

using namespace std;

int main() {
    int n;
    cin >> n;
    while (n-- > 0) { tc(); }
}

Not sure I would recommend turning off swap files. It happens to me not infrequently that there is a crash while I’m editing code. Swap files are also useful as a signal when a file is opened by a Vim in the background but you accidentally open it again in another Vim instance. With swap files enabled you would get a nasty warning that a swap file already exists. Not sure what would happen in that case if swap files are disabled.

To set it up, I would run vim ~/.vimrc, manually enter those 5 lines in whichever order that I remembered them, then quit and restart Vim to pick up the new configurations.

You should be able to run :source % to get all of those without having to restart vim first!

If you like set incsearch and use neovim, you may also like set inccommand=nosplit. Funny enough too how emacs evil mode sort of defaults to a lot of these properties out of the box as well. In terms of case insensitivity I prefer rebinding search with something like noremap / /\v\c so I can delete the flags instead of toggling them after typing /

highlighted, incremental search? so gross

I use this:

set nocp bs=2 cot= hid is ru sm t_te= t_ti= vb wim=longest,list

Explained at http://leahneukirchen.org/blog/archive/2020/05/a-minimal-vimrc.html

set ts=2 sw=2 et number
syn on