There are a few editor-specific configuration files in the crawl repo, which you may choose to enable. Currently the provided files are: Vim: source/dat/vim/syntax/levdes.vim, which includes a header at the top of the file telling you how to install it. This will be useful if you are editing the .des files used to define vaults or levels, but is not necessary otherwise. You can also set the appropriate indentation options for crawl source files by adding the following to your .vimrc or as a new file in ~/.vim/ftdetect/ : autocmd! BufNewFile,BufRead */crawl-ref/* setlocal sw=4 et Emacs: source/dat/emacs/dir-locals.el contains a couple of settings for editing C++ source files in the crawl-approved style, and can be activated by copying (or, preferably, symlinking) it to source/.dir-locals.el