Can not get Matchit.vim to work. What am I Doing Wrong?

[Martin McCormick]

	I installed the vim editor and the plugin script called
matchit.vim in order to debug a shell script that isn't taking
the right branch. I did the :help matchit-install command which
gives you instructions for installing matchit.vim in one's own
directory and all of that seemed to go perfectly. I ended up
with a directory of ~/.vim and the subdirectories ~/.vim/doc and
~/.vim/plugin. The plugin directory now has matchit.vim and the
doc directory has matchit.txt.

	After doing the :helptags ~/.vim/doc command, the help
tags work and I can do, for example :help g% and see those
instructions.

	The .vimrc file I use is supposed to activate matchit on
startup and it does appear to modify vim's behavior but not the
right way.

	If I go to an if statement, for instance, and hit the %
key, absolutely nothing happens. The same is true with the g%
command which is supposed to go in reverse. If you are at an
endif, it should put you on the if that went with it. Again,
nothing, so much as a beep happens.

	I installed vim and matchit.vim on 3 systems, one is
FreeBSD and the rest are all Debian Linux and all are
misbehaving in exactly the same way which tells me it's me, but
I am not sure what I misinterpreted.

	I might have .vimrc set up in such a way that it is not
working due to comflicting commands. If, for instance, the
compatible flag is set, matchit won't work so I have
nocompatible set. Here is the .vimrc file.

	If one of you has gotten this to work, I would
appreciate any advice since it all seemed very straight-forward.
The .vimrc file follows:

set nocompatible
:runtime macros/matchit.vim
:let b:match_words = &matchpairs
set noruler
set tw=70

End of .vimrc

Martin McCormick WB5AGZ  Stillwater, OK 
Systems Engineer
OSU Information Technology Department Network Operations Group