Vim word breaks and perl

I use vim for coding my Perl and in the most recent versions of Ubuntu I’ve not been keen on one of the changes to the syntax defaults.  The word definition has start to include : which means that class names like Blah::Thing count as one word which isn’t how I’m used to working.  Luckily vim is very configurable and the vim irc channel is also really helpful so I was able to find where the configuration was and how to override it quickly.

Finding out that it’s related to the iskeyword configuration was pretty simple, but changing that didn’t have any effect.  It turns out it is set in a Perl syntax specific configuration so overriding it is a little more tricky.

Figuring out where a configuration setting was set is done using :verb set ?

:verb set isk?
iskeyword=@,48-57,_,192-255,:
Last set from /usr/share/vim/vim74/ftplugin/perl.vim

Knowing where that was set I could then override it with an ‘after’ configuration file.

" ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/perl.vim
set iskeyword-=:

Then when I check in vim,

:verb set isk?
iskeyword=@,48-57,_,192-255
Last set from ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/perl.vim

For more of a discussion of the language specific configuration and the after files see this vim wiki entry – http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Keep_your_vimrc_file_clean