title: Missing leader in Vim
body: <p>It took me almost two years of programming till I decided to switch Textmate for Vim and I love it so far. However, after playing with it for a few days I hit a first issue.</p>
  
  <p>As a beginner I reached for Janus as many people do but in the end I decided to create my own configuration from scratch to get to know the stuff better. I backed my configs up and started writing my new <code>.vimrc</code> file. But later on (pretty early) I noticed that leader key isn't working, it does nothing when I press it, well it just beeps. I didn't change the key for a leader nor did any key mapping so I was kinda surprised.</p>
  
  <p>So once again I removed my <code>.vimrc</code> file and <code>.vim</code> directory to start with a clean state. It didn't help. So I opened Vim and tried to reconfigure a leader to a different key to see if it helps.</p>
  
  <pre><code>:let mapleader
  &gt; E121: Undefined variable: mapleader
  :let mapleader = ','
  :let mapleader
  &gt; mapleader          ,
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Looks fine but nothing really happened. Even when I put it under a different key my Mac just beeps and thats it. There's no vim configuration in my home directory, no plugins, nothing. Setting leader in '.vimrc' instead of vim console doesn't help either.</p>
  
  <p>I saw some discussions here on timeouts for key pressing but it have not got me anywhere.  </p>
  
  <p>I'm kinda stuck here and not able to use Vim for my day to day job even if I'd love to. Any help would be highly appreciated.</p>