... and it's driving me nuts. I thought I was going crazy, but it's vim.

What is the best way to blacklist this (trivial) package from upgrades?

Can I put dummy packages

vim-9.9.9999-9-i686.pkg.tar.xz
vim-runtime-9.9.9999-9-i686.pkg.tar.xz

in /var/cache/pacman/pkg/? Or something similar? I see blackpac, but is that the best way?

I do not use anything with pacman so cannot help with blacklisting the package.

But I would suggest that a better way might be to simply configure vim for your preferences using ~/.vimrc, and by creating your own custom option files that will not be clobbered by a package update (ex: /usr/share/vim/.../colors/my-own-colors.vim).

I maintain my own which I have tweaked over several years and always install them on any new system or server, and I always have the same familiar vim!

Indeed. That's what I had for the past 10 years on my last trusty steed.

As update, the best and easiest solution is to get my own vim source code, compile it with --prefix=$HOME, and dump it in ~/bin, which is first in my path from .bashrc.

I guess I'm pretty picky about my editor. Default vim settings from factory make it look like Christmas in Times Square when the cursor moves. I can't get any work done.

Anyone have a good matchparens.vim? I can't find my old one. I think it was about 6 lines long, not a petition to Ministry of HTML and Parentheses.

As an update, I thought "While I got the source code sitting right here, why not hack some annoyance out of it."

So I got rid of that bloody infuriating way the cursor moves back and forth when you go in and out of insert mode. LOL. Finally got around to it.