Vim settings file on Windows
Question:
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 (.vimrc
does not work on Windows). And if I have names
right (read the next para) then I don't know why it is not picking up the settings from it.
I tried creating _vimrc
and _gvimrc
in the root directory where I copied the file from the example settings file that came installed with vim. I set the following command on top of the example commands:
set nobackup
set nowritebackup
set guifont=Courier_New:h11:cANSI
It is not accepting this file (whether it is named _vimrc
or
_gvimrc
, I tried both) as the settings file as the font has not changed on the next start-up and still writes backup files.
Answer:
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.