How to reference/source a custom .vimrc file

Question

Is there a way to reference (or "source") another user's .vimrc file?

When I kuu (a variant of su that uses kerberos security tokens) to an admin user ID, I would like to use my personal .vimrc file.

I don't want to overwrite the admin's existing .vimrc file because the admin ID is shared by multiple users.

Solution 1

You can use the MYVIMRC environment variable. This way, you won't have to pass -u each time you fire up vim. (You can of course do an alias instead, but that won't help with e.g., vipw)

Keep in mind that .vimrc can execute arbitrary commands, if you use /home/user/.vimrc you may be creating a security issue (e.g., someone manages to compromise your user account, changes your .vimrc, and then gets root the next time you edit a file as root). You can, of course, keep a known-safe copy in ~root/ somewhere.

You could assumably even set something up in ~root/.bashrc to automatically set MYVIMRC to something different for each different administrator.

Solution 2

Try -u parameter and specify a path to an alternative configuration file.

For example: vim -u /home/jesse/myvimrc

See http://linuxcommand.org/lc3_man_pages/vim1.html

Solution 3

Use an alternate .vimrc file without plugins as mentioned, and add an alias in .bash_profile or something.

alias svim='vim -u ~/.vimrc_simple'

Really I prefer the following:

alias vvim='vim -u ~/.vimrc_vundle'

In order to keep vim as a lightweight command, as plugin loading seems to slow down program instantiation.

Solution 4

In vim:

:source /path/to/your/.vimrc

Solution 5

I've only ever attempted this a few times and this seems to work fine for me. Define an alias for vim that is something like the following:

alias vim="HOME=~yournormaluser vim -c 'let \$HOME = \"$HOME\"'"

What this does is trick vim into using your $HOME/.vim/ environment, yet resets $HOME from within vim so doing things like :e ~/something.txt will still use the admin user's $HOME.

This has the added advantage that you don't have to change the admin's ~/.vimrc at all.

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Comments

[Randy Morris]

Then again, this would alias vim for everyone who uses that admin user. When I've done this in the past I was in a situation where my environment was aware I was su'ing from my $USER and sourced ~$USER/.aliases so I could get away with this. Maybe you can still use this information somehow.

[Luc Hermitte]

add a randy_gvim alias, something the others are unlikely to use.

[derobert]

Sourcing $USER/.aliases probably creates a security hole. See the note in my answer for an explanation.

[Luc Hermitte]

It's not enough: the &rtp is not updated this way -- well, of course the .vimrc could reset the &rtp.

[Randy Morris]

@derobert: Indeed. In my case the 'admin' account was actually just a shared user account. For simply editing as root with an altered environment I'd almost always suggest sudo -e or sudoedit.

[Mansoor Siddiqui]

Thanks for this, it's just what I asked. And I also appreciate the security warnings.

[derobert]

@Ruslan well, the question is about a .vimrc file, so... It won't work for EMACS either. Or joe, or nano, or Microsoft Word. (And if you call vim as vi, then you're asking it to run in compatibility mode) [I'm probably misunderstanding what you're trying to say; please clarify.]

[Tagar]

vi also uses .vimrc. so I guess my comment is valid - author of the topic didn't specify if he is using vi or vim or both. ps. on some of the systems vi is linked to vim actually.

[derobert]

@Ruslan vi does not use .vimrc. vi is a completely separate program than vim, which reads ~/.exrc. There are also the relatively popular nvi and elvis clones; neither of them read .vimrc. Often, a version of vim is installed (or symlinked) to vi (and which you'd use $EXINIT to override). Though it actually still works fine, unless you have it symlinked to vim.tiny (a version of Vim built to be as small file size as possible), which ignores $MYVIMRC no matter what name you call it under.

[gmatht]

Not quite unfortunately. man -u: -u {vimrc} Use the commands in the file {vimrc} for initializations. Sounds good so far, but it also puts vim in a special mode which All the other initializations are skipped. This caused hard to debug problems for me which I tracked down to vim -u ~/vimrc not being equivalent to vim. What worked for me was: vim -u <(echo source /usr/share/vim/vimrc; cat ~/.vimrc) using the bash shell specific <(...) capture.

[Jorengarenar]

Disclaimer: In current versions of Vim, the MYVIMRC environmental variable is not read. Vim only sets it (if vimrc file has been found in one of hardcoded, specified locations, see :h .vimrc)