I've somehow gotten the directory above in a state where a it's changed color and added an asterisk. I've saved and quit and it still looks like this. What do I need to do to get rid of this?
I've tried saving and exiting vim.
Related
Hi I am trying to update one of my remote repositories. When I use commit in git bash it shows that a SWP file already exists and askes me if I want to (R)ead only the file (E)dit (D)elete. I tried editing the file, but I cannot save the changes and therefore cannot commit my changes. Any idea what is going on.
EDIT:
It's working now thanks to those that helped. In terms of the question I will try to only show the relevant information when asking questions in the future.
When you edit a file, Vim stores your changes in a "swap file" so that you can recover your work if Vim's process is killed before you could save. This can be caused by something as problematic as a system crash or, simply, by closing your terminal window while Vim is running.
If Vim is quitted "normally", it deletes the swap file it created.
If it is not, the swap file is left behind and, the next time you open the same file, Vim will notice the presence of the swap file and offer you the possibility to recover the work that you "lost" the last time Vim quitted "abnormally".
That is the interactive screen you get with the "(R)ead only the file (E)dit (D)elete" prompt.
Now, when you are starting out with stuff like Git, Vim, the command line, etc. it may happen quite often that you find yourself in an uncomfortable situation, not knowing exactly what to do to fix it. This is frankly quite normal at this stage. In those situations, closing the terminal window might seem like a good first step in going back to a more comfortable situation to start again. In some cases, however, doing so might leave a trail of hidden files and broken states that might make it harder than you hoped to get to that comfortable situation.
When you do $ git commit, Git populates a specific temporary file located in your local .git directory:
.git/COMMIT_EDITMSG
with some text describing the commit you are about to make, and opens that file with your designated editor, which is the dreaded Vim by default.
When you start editing the file, Vim creates a swap file. If you insert your commit message, write the file, and quit Vim normally, the swap file is deleted and you won't ever be prompted about it. If you close the terminal window before writing the file, the swap file stays behind and Vim will prompt you about it the next time you try to make a commit.
From there you have quite a few options…
Go into your .git directory and delete the swap file(s) manually. They should be named .git/.COMMIT_EDITMSG.swp (or .swo, .swn, etc. see :help swap-files in Vim). This should give you a clean state for the next time you do $ git commit.
Don't close your terminal window when faced with a problem. Instead, try to analyze what went wrong and look for proper ways to fix it. If you have to close the terminal window, look for stray swap files just in case.
Learn Vim's basics so that you don't have to close the terminal window when you mess up your commits. Try $ vimtutor.
Tell Git to use a text editor you are more familiar with. Search Stack Overflow, I am sure there are dozens of Q/As about that.
Configure Vim to never create swap files. You can do it in Vim's configuration file:
# in $HOME/.vimrc
set noswapfile
This won't tell it to ignore existing swap files, though, so you might want to delete them manually anyway.
Use a graphical Git client instead of the CLI.
EDIT: it turns out if I write to a temporary .go file in the same directory I can then start writing the file again, so I'm almost certain this is a vim-syntastic issue. Going to mark this as closed.
I have an infrequent (but extremely annoying) bug where vim gets confused about where a file is supposed to be written to. It will suddenly decide that it should be writing to "-stdin-", even though :echo expand('%:p') is showing the correct file.
When this happens, there's basically no way to write the buffer back to the correct file. :w % doesn't help, nor does :w NameOfFile.go. I can write to a different filename just fine. :bd does not fix the issue. This only happens if there's a location list open.
Given the lack of google hits for this, I'm guessing this is some kind of issue with my local config. How can I go about debugging this problem?
Edit to add: after posting this, I realized that this is very possibly related to vim-syntastic. I've opened an issue there, but it's definitely possible there's something else causing this.
Marking as closed since this appears to be a vim-syntastic issue.
I noticed that for whatever reason, my _vimrc wasn't being loaded this morning. I keep my entire vim directory saved to my Google Drive to the location I specify in my _vimrc. I didn't worry about it since I'd recently backed it up, but now when I dump it into my vim folder, whenever I start up gVim, it looks like it renames it to _vimrc.2014.
I can't find anything about this behavior, is it normal? It doesn't really affect me too much since it still gets source, but I just want to know why it's doing that.
Vim certainly is not doing this. I'm not certain it's causing YOUR problem, but Google Drive has problems replacing files with a new file of the same name. Under the hood, that is exactly what Vim is doing when it writes a file with default settings. See https://groups.google.com/d/topic/vim_use/jkw_nnHz9cE/discussion : you can use either the 'backupskip' or 'writebackup' options to force Vim to write the file directly instead of replacing it with a new file when editing inside your Google Drive folder. I'm using this line in my .vimrc to accomplish the task:
let &backupskip.=','.expand('$HOME/Google\ Drive/').'*'
I've searched for some time now and nobody seems to have the problem I do. I've got vim set up to use the colorscheme I like and it was all working perfectly until I opened a file that had a swap. I got the usual message asking if I wanted to delete it, read only or recover it. I selected recover and after doing so I've been unable to get that one file to display the colors I want.
I've tried the usual syntax:on, reloaded .vimrc and just about every normal step required to get the highlights. The strange thing is that the problem is only present for this one file when it's in the directory I recovered the swap from. Any other file I open has the colors working as usual, and if I rename the troublesome file or put it in another directory it loads the colors fine.
I figure vim must be storing its path somewhere but I have no idea where. I tried deleting .viminfo but that did nothing. Any input is greatly appreciated.
Sorry, I'm new to Stackoverflow. I think this is more useful as an answer to my own question than a comment:
:colo outputs "torte" and se ft? outputs "filetype=" I tried the same commands on other files and se ft? outputs "filetype=cpp". I searched for how to set the filetype and set filetype=cpp fixed the issue. Thanks Balthamos for pointing me in the right direction!
This is my issue with Vim: you have it open for a couple of days. You're ready to close vim. You don't necessarily want to save all files... you want to skip any files which don't have modified changes, and you want to be left (or be asked) what you want to do with the remaining buffers with unmodified changes…
For anyone that has used Photoshop, this is very familiar… you use it for a week, and when you close Photoshop, it is really trying to close the application, and skips all files which haven't been touched, let's you chose what you want to do with the remaining files, and then closes itself.
It seems like every time I close Vim, I have to go through this circus of doing :qa, then running into a file, doing :bd!, then doing :qa again, run into a file I want, :w, and it's just a huge pain. There has to be a better way of doing this.
If it isn't already obvious… I have :set hidden in my .vimrc.
How about
:confirm qa
It asks you for each modified file whether to save or abandon it (or all remaining). This is the same behavior that GVIM exhibits when you close it via the X in the window title.
does :xa! solve your problem ?
:xa[ll]! Write all changed buffers, even the ones that are readonly,
and exit Vim. If there are buffers without a file name or
which cannot be written for another reason, Vim will not quit.
I was able to find the plugin BufOnly, and then with the help of someone else on StackOverflow, I got an answer that satisfies me:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/14690570/240287