It could follow you. In the recent discussion of TMUX some people said that they have remote systems configured in such a way that the personal config files are automatically downloaded when they login as their dedicated user. All you need to do is to put your dotfiles put your dotfiles on S3 (IIRC), download happens on first login (again, IIRC).

In other words, "your config doesn't follow you" is more of a philosophical problem rather than a technical one. Personally, I think it's a bit silly.

I mean, you wouldn't normally think of running Nginx, Supervisord, Redis, Postgres, etc. without config files, so why do you (people who are against personal configs on servers) insist that we use Vim, Emacs, Git, Tmux, etc. without one? Using Vim (less so than Emacs, but still) without your .vimrc is like using Nginx with default nginx.conf. You can still serve static files if you can find your htdocs dir after all.

A sane global (system-wide) config for the tools would solve some issues, but that's a first step towards personal customization (which, as mentioned, is unacceptable for some people), so in practice we're mostly stuck with nearly unusable tools when we work on remote servers...

Ok, I feel a bit better now, sorry for ranting :)

That's why I don't really customize vim at all, or make fancy macros, or any of that. I work on a half-dozen different machines and OSes every week, I can't be bothered to customize those environments just to lose them every time I re-format.