First of all, to prevent an X/Y Problem, I'll just state that what I really want is:
- Run vim as the root user.
- Instruct vim to use my nice pretty color scheme and all my plugins.
- Do all this without contaminating the
/root/.vimrc
or the/root/.vim
folder. - Do all this without running
sudo vim
hopefully…
I have my own account on each linux server with the following two files.
/home/b/.vim
- My folder with my plugins etc.
/home/b/.vimrc
- My dot vimrc file
Here is my first try running with my custom vim settings:
vim -u ~b/.vimrc
Error detected while processing /root/.vimrc:
line 33:
E185: Cannot find color scheme railscasts
line 82:
E117: Unknown function: ...
Press ENTER or type command to continue
However, my .vimrc file is searching for a plugin which only exists in my /home/b/.vim folder. Up until now I have always copied my own /home/b/.vim folder to the root user's area like so:
cp -r /home/b/.vim /root
But unfortunately this contaminates the root account's home folder, and I want to stop doing that (if possible). Can anyone tell me an environment variable, or any trick at all, to run with my own COMPLETE vim environment (including my plugins, etc.) without contaminating root?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
PS – I have gone through the info vim
documentation and tried setting VIMRUNTIME VIMRC and other environment variables. They didn't help me, perhaps I was doing something wrong…?
Best Answer
You can add your
.vim
runtimepath on top of your.vimrc
file:This makes vim search for plugins, colors etc. in
/home/b/.vim
first and then in the standard location (for example/usr/share/vim/vim72/
in debian squeeze).I'm using this together with an alias
vim='vim -u /home/b/.vimrc'
.