Vim stores the list of commands that we applied using : for the current execution.
But when I close vim and start it again, the vim command history is lost.
I tried set history = 1000 in the .vimrc file but that did not help.
Where does Vim maintain the local command history?
What is the command to retain command history?
Just an issue that caught me out the other day, which may or may not be your problem:
On some Linux systems (e.g. Ubuntu), if the very first time you run VIM, you run it as a super-user, then the $HOME/.viminfo file gets created with root owner and your local user does not have permissions to write to it. This explained why my VIM was not storing command history when it was all configured up correctly.
Bottom line: on a *nix system, locate your .viminfo file, and make sure you have read/write permissions on it.
To check whether Vim supports the 'viminfo' file (which stores the history), :echo has('viminfo'). The corresponding setting must not be empty: :set viminfo?, and :set history? should be greater than one.
If there's a problem writing the viminfo file (though Vim should complain in that case), you could try passing a different location via vim -i /tmp/viminfo
You should check the permissions of the .viminfo file. You might need to change owner of the file to your current user using chown or sudo chown.
Mr. Baint has given the answer.
Go to $HOME directory.
give ls -l .viminfo to check permissions.
change permission so that group and owner also can have write
permission. use:
sudo chown yourUserId $HOME/.viminfo
It should fix the issue.
You will have to set the viminfo option. Set it in your $MYVIMRC
Update To find out where the option was last set/changed:
:verbose set viminfo?
See http://vimdoc.sourceforge.net/htmldoc/starting.html#viminfo-file
If you exit Vim and later start it again, you would normally lose a lot of
information. The viminfo file can be used to remember that information, which
enables you to continue where you left off.
This is introduced in section |21.3| of the user manual.
The viminfo file is used to store:
The command line history.
The search string history.
The input-line history.
Contents of non-empty registers.
Marks for several files.
File marks, pointing to locations in files.
Last search/substitute pattern (for 'n' and '&').
The buffer list.
Global variables.
The viminfo file is not supported when the |+viminfo| feature has been
disabled at compile time.
You could also use Session files.
I went round in circles on this one a bit on Ubuntu and set viminfo solutions proposed above resulted in errors.
I eventually did the command "version" in the command mode and it came back with "-" for most stuff including:
-cmdline_hist
-cmdline_info
I ran the following command and it all worked fine again:
sudo apt install vim
I had the same problem. The issue was that I had vim-minimal installed (this is a default with Fedora), which does not support history. I had to uninstall it and install the full vim instead. I now have history... and syntaxic coloration !
If you are using a vimrc file, check your folders and files for existence and correctness
set history=200
set undolevels=128
set undodir=~/.vim/undodir/
set undofile
set undolevels=1000
set undoreload=10000
If the specified folder (undodir in my case) does not exist, the history will not be saved.
Related
Each time I save (:w) this warning comes up:
E510 can't make backupfile.
/.vimrc includes
set backupdir=/.vim/backups
set dir=/.vim/backups
Those locations exist and I have write permissions to those files.
:verbose set backupdir? says
Last set from ~/.vimrc
I went into the /usr/local/Cellar/macvim/8.0-137/MacVim.app/Contents/Resources/vim directory, made sure I had permissions there in case that was an issue, looked at the vimrc file there and saw nothing about backupdir.
I am tempted to uninstall and reinstall mccvim with home-brew but I am not sure if that will do the job. I prefer not to
set: no backup
but essentially that is what I have now since I can only save with :w!
I have Vim version 8.0 on Mac Sierra 10.12.6
You seem to be confusing / and ~. And a bunch of other things…
The former represents the root of your filesystem, to which you almost certainly not have write privileges if you are not root.
The latter represents your "home" directory, to which you have write privilege. Your "home" can be represented with:
$HOME
~
/Users/username
So, taking your question one part at a time…
Each time I save (:w) this warning comes up:
E510 can't make backupfile.
It means that you can't write to the directory where Vim stores its backup files.
/.vimrc includes
set backupdir=/.vim/backups
set dir=/.vim/backups
Those locations exist and I have write permissions to those files.
You may have a ~/.vimrc (a .vimrc in your "home") but almost certainly not a /.vimrc (a .vimrc at the root of your filesystem).
The right place for your vimrc is either:
~/.vimrc,
~/.vim/vimrc (no dot!).
Your settings tell Vim that it should write backup files in /.vim/backups but there are a few problems with that.
Problems include:
/.vim/ almost certainly doesn't exist,
/.vim/backups/ is therefore very unlikely to exist,
your normal user almost certainly doesn't have the right to write in / anyway.
Assuming the ~/.vim/ directory exists, those options should be:
set backupdir=~/.vim/backups
set dir=~/.vim/backups
:verbose set backupdir? says
Last set from ~/.vimrc
Yeah, no problem here.
I went into the /usr/local/Cellar/macvim/8.0-137/MacVim.app/Contents/Resources/vim directory, made sure I had permissions there in case that was an issue, looked at the vimrc file there and saw nothing about backupdir.
What makes you think anything in Vim's runtime files has anything to do with your issue? Vim told you Last set from ~/.vimrc so there's nowhere else to look.
I am tempted to uninstall and reinstall mccvim with home-brew but I am not sure if that will do the job. I prefer not to
set: no backup
but essentially that is what I have now since I can only save with :w!
Reinstalling MacVim won't change anything. Taking an introductory course on the UNIX shell is definitely a better idea.
Also, did you mean :set nobackup? And I'm not sure "since I can only save with :w" means anything.
I am having trouble saving my settings on vim. I know that in order to do that I need to open the vimrc file but when I do that it says that the file is readonly and won't let me edit it, preventing me from saving my settings.
It says that in order to force save it or override it, I need to add the ! mark after :w in the command section, which I do, but it still does not work.
I can't find any other solution to this problem.
Note: I am using Windows 8.1.
On Windows, you may need to run your editor as administrator to write to your system's _vimrc file.
You may also create a _vimrc in your home directory (e.g. C:\Users\Piet\_vimrc, see the output of :echo $HOME) without administrator access.
You can solve it this way:
Instead of :w, type :w !sudo tee %. I guess it should work.
(my answer is based on this tutotial where the whole problem is well-described)
You may be editing the one global vimrc in /etc/vimrc to which you don't have access.
Make sure you're editing ~/.vimrc and check that you have read and write priviledges to the file (ls -l ~/.vimrc). Since the file is in your home folder you should have those privilages but it won't hurt to verify.
I have modified the .vimrc file in my user. The settings dont work when i switch to superuser.
When i check the contents of the file (using vim editor) i can see the mapped keystrokes of newlines
(with all the text extending on the rightside beyond screen on same line), but when i check the contents of .vimrc as root, i see all the text in the same window screen one below the other (this may be a very stupid difference, but that is the only difference i noticed. all the data in the file is same).
i am unable to understand what is wrong and how can i correct it.
root is a user too, when you start vim with root, vim load the root's Home/.vimrc usually it is /root/.vimrc
You can cp or ln -s your user's vimrc to /root if this is a personal desktop machine.
I hope I understood your problem.
You did not state a precise question, so for the sake of completeness :
If what you want is being able to modify files as root using your user's vim and .vimrc, you can do
sudo -e /path/to/your/file
sudo will use the editor configured in $EDITOR as the current user, to edit a temporary copy of the file that will get copied over when you write the file.
The caveat is that you will not be able to have any edition history between sessions. For example, if you modify /etc/group once, save the changes and quit, and then reopen the file again, you will not be able to undo the modification you did at first.
For Neovim users, you can do what comes next:
If your root user settings for neovim are important, make a
backup for those dotfiles.
Create a symbolic link from your default user to /root/.config directory.
sudo mv /root/.config/nvim /root/.config/nvim.bkp; sudo ln -s $HOME/.config/nvim /root/.config/
Be aware that some plugins may need some files that are not under
.config/nvim directory.
On Debian GNU/Linux there is also a shared configuration file in /usr/share/vim/vimrc. (Actually this is a soft link to /etc/vim/vimrc.) See the bottom of the man page on vim.
When I open a file from Windows Explorer using right-click -> Edit with Vim, Vim creates a "Program" folder on the root, and a "Files" folder in the directory of the file I've opened. The Files folder includes Vim/vimfiles/doc. There are no files anywhere, just the directory tree.
This also happens when I run Vim without a file name as an argument.
A DOS Box flashes just before Vim opens, but it goes away too fast for me to read what it's saying.
I've used Vim for years and have never seen this behavior. This is the first time, however, that I've used it on Windows 8.1.
Any suggestions or ideas? I'm getting really tired of deleting Program and Files folders all over the place. Lol!
You could follow the steps on Vim-FAQ 2.5. Some relevant parts follows:
2.5. I have a "xyz" (some) problem with Vim. How do I determine it is a
problem with my setup or with Vim? / Have I found a bug in Vim?
First, you need to find out, whether the error is in the actual
runtime files or any plugin that is distributed with Vim or whether it
is a simple side effect of any configuration option from your .vimrc
or .gvimrc. So first, start vim like this:
vim -u NONE -U NONE -N -i NONE
this starts Vim in nocompatible mode (-N), without reading your
viminfo file (-i NONE), without reading any configuration file (-u
NONE for not reading .vimrc file and -U NONE for not reading a .gvimrc
file) or even plugin.
If the error does not occur when starting Vim this way, then the
problem is either related to some plugin of yours or some setting in
one of your local setup files. You need to find out, what triggers the
error, you try starting Vim this way:
vim -u NONE -U NONE -N
If the error occurs, the problem is your .viminfo file. Simply delete
the viminfo file then. If the error does not occur, try:
vim -u ~/.vimrc --noplugin -N -i NONE
This will simply use your .vimrc as configuration file, but not load
any plugins. If the error occurs this time, the error is possibly
caused by some configuration option inside your .vimrc file. Depending
on the length of your vimrc file, it can be quite hard to trace the
origin within that file.
The best way is to add :finish command in the middle of your .vimrc.
Then restart again using the same command line. If the error still
occurs, the bug must be caused because of a setting in the first half
of your .vimrc. If it doesn't happen, the problematic setting must be
in the second half of your .vimrc. So move the :finish command to the
middle of that half, of which you know that triggers the error and
move your way along, until you find the problematic option. If your
.vimrc is 350 lines long, you need at a maximum 9 tries to find the
offending line (in practise, this can often be further reduced, since
often lines depend on each other).
If the problem does not occur, when only loading your .vimrc file, the
error must be caused by a plugin or another runtime file (indent
autoload or syntax script). Check the output of the :scriptnames
command to see what files have been loaded and for each one try to
disable each one by one and see which one triggers the bug. Often
files that are loaded by vim, have a simple configuration variable to
disable them, but you need to check inside each file separately.
There is additional information on the link if the steps above doesn't solves the problem.
In Vim, is it possible to change the default location of the user vimrc file, i.e., from $HOME/.vimrc to some other location ?
Another solution might be to create a symlink to you preferred location. I have my .vimrc in $HOME/.vim/.vimrc and symlink to it. This way I can have it in a git repo and backup it.
You must start vim with the command vim -u ./path/to/your/vimrcfile
vim -u NONE is a good way to start Vim without any plugin or customisation.
See :help starting.txt for more information.
The VIMINIT variable is my preferred method. The problem with aliasing vim with the -u flag is that if vim is opened in some way other than from the shell command your configuration won't get pulled in. Setting $VIMINIT does not suffer from this drawback. Check this out for more information.
export VIMINIT='source $MYVIMRC'
export MYVIMRC='~/.vim/vimrc' #or any other location you want
Note that Vim normally sets the MYVIMRC variable, though I'm not sure exactly what it's used for. Based on my testing, using VIMINIT in this fashion will result in it not being automatically set on startup as it would normally be. This is why I'm setting it myself.
This works for neovim too!
On Windows, I have the _vimrc that's in my home directory contain one line, source c:\path\to\my.vimrc.
I have not yet worked out a good way to move the entirety of my vimfiles folder, but that's less critical as it's all stuff I've installed from elsewhere. I.e., it'd be easy to restore if I lost it. (I know that I can change runtimepath but my problem is more coming up with a "good" way to do so.)
Update
After six years I extended slightly from what I mention in the comments below; as I put stuff into 'after' and wanted to just keep rtp clean I got something that has been solid for a while now. Today in my %USERPROFILE%\_vimrc I do hardcode the actual paths to things and it changes on every machine I use (and I basically do the same thing on *nix) but this gets copied around mostly-manually when setting up a new PC. I also have a version which I can use to launch Vim on another connected machine on the network, e.g. a co-worker's machine, so I get my config and all that, but the gist is:
set runtimepath^=E:/dotfiles/vim
set runtimepath+=E:/dotfiles/vim/after
set runtimepath-=~/vimfiles
set runtimepath-=~/vimfiles/after
runtime vimrc
and then %USERPROFILE%\_gvimrc just has one line:
runtime gvimrc
(Both vimrc and gvimrc are in the /dotfiles/vim folder and also on Bitbucket.)
I see two options, depending on your needs.
Have ~/.vimrc import the other location
create an alias in your bashrc alias vim="vim -u otherlocation"
I edited
C:\Program Files\Vim\_vimrc
and changed both the runtimepath and sourced my own .vimrc.
I also use these settings in Cygwin (and have them version controlled). So it's this in practice (added at the bottom of the _vimrc file):
let &runtimepath = 'C:\cygwin\home\cygwinaccount\.vim,' . &runtimepath
source C:\cygwin\home\cygwinaccount\.vimrc
Bliss ! :)
In linux:
You can edit .bashrc or .zshrc startup script and add the following lines to change the default location of .vimrc file
export VIMINIT='source $MYVIMRC'
export MYVIMRC='~/.vim/.vimrc' # Note the . (dot) before vimrc. If that is what you have called it.
I feel like the simplest solution is to just have a single line in ~/.vimrc that loads the vimrc from the other location, i.e.:
source PATH/TO/OTHER/LOCATION/.vimrc