I can\'t believe I am typing a question for a simple thing like this but here we are. I can\'t for the life of me figure out what the exact name for the settings file is for vim
On Windows systems, the best way to find the value of $HOME is from within Vim, as follows. These commands are useful to see what directories your Vim is using:
:version
:echo expand('~')
:echo $HOME
:echo $VIM
:echo $VIMRUNTIME
Note the system vimrc file
and user vimrc file
paths displayed by the :version
command. The system vimrc file can be created by an administrator to customize Vim for all users. In addition, each user can have his or her own user vimrc
.
Why not just edit the vimrc file in vim itself and figure it out its name?. Using the following command.
:e $MYVIMRC
As ghiscoding mentions in a comment, you may need to run Vim as an administrator to be able to save your changes.
my _vimrc
/_gvimrc
is stored at C:/Users/<ME>/_vimrc
and is working fine.
It's generally a good idea to keep personal settings separate from installation files.
To get more information about the search paths for your configuration files, type :he vimrc-intro.
And be careful: the docs say
For MS-DOS and MS-Windows you can use one of these:
$HOME/_vimrc
$VIM/_vimrc
While this is absolutely true, it could be a bit surprising that $VIM
does not expand to e.g. C:/Program Files/vim/<your_version>
(this is what $VIMRUNTIME
holds) but only to C:/Program Files/vim/
.
This said, C:/Program Files/vim/_vimrc
should be read during startup.