Vim is great but do you ever get tired of having “Help poor children in Uganda!” thrown in your face everytime it opens? I don’t particularly appreciate the author using Vim as a platform for his personal views. Although perhaps naming my own projects after biblical demons is not so different. In any event, you may have other compelling reasons to customise your Vim splash page into something more useful or motivating.
Below is some Vimscript which can be added to a .vimrc to produce a custom splash page. This one simply prints the word “hello”. I have added lots of comments so hopfully every part is clear even if the reader does not know much Vimscript.
If you’d rather separate the message from the code, it is possible to read it in from an external file. I think adding a random BSD Fortune quote to the top is a neat idea. Or perhaps a little bit of ascii art with the help of jp2a.