Windows & DOS: Issues & Discussions

It turns out that, as usual, vim has incredibly helpful diagnostic info:

From within vim or gvim, try the following:

Code:

:echo $HOME 
:echo $VIM 
:echo $VIMRUNTIME
:version

Open vimrc file - Vim Tips Wiki has more details

Just saw your post. My _vimrc does not have those source and behave lines.
It does have the nocompatible line.

Yes, those lines could well be the cause of the problem. You could comment them out as follows, and see what happens.

Code:

 " behave mswin

Are you saying :set nu does NOT show the line numbers when you manually enter from within vim or gvim?

forum,

I commented out all those lines with no change.
I made an _vimrc file with only the line ":set nu" and again
with only "set nu", neither worked.

I don't know how to enter "set nu" directly into gvim and can't
find a place to set the path.

Keep giving me things to try and we'll figure this out.

jerryd

My gvim (I normally just use vim) works the same as vim, along with the added menu at top.

You should be able to type :set nu command directly into gvim. The colon moves you to ex mode so you will see the : at the bottom. Then type in set nu command (set nu) and press ENTER. Hopefully, the line numbers appear!

Once that works, you should be able to type in the other diagnostic commands like :version and the others, to figure out where gvim thinks _vimrc lives.

According to that article, you can even directly edit the _vimrc file, whichever one vim is using, from within vim or gvim, with :e $MYVIMRC command.

The _vimrc lines do NOT start with : colon. The : is only needed from within vim, to switch to ex mode.

On UNIX Systems, vi (and ex) will look for the EXINIT environment variable. If it is set, it names a file containing ex commands. If the file exists, is readable, and the file's owner matches the current process's UID; then vi will read initialization commands from that file. If not; vi will look for the file .exrc in the user's home directory. After that, vi will look for .exrc in the current directory.

On Windows, it could be looking for _exrc instead of .exrc. With vim instead of vi, it could also be looking for .vimrc or .virc (or _vimrc or _virc) instead of or in addition to .exrc (_exrc).

If you can figure out which file your vi or vim is trying to read, the command you want to add to that file is:

Code:

set tabstop=4

If you can't figure out which initialization file to use, you can always enter the command:

Code:

:set tabstop=4

any time you're in command mode during your editing session to set the tabstops being used for your current editing session.

Forum,

So with all the replies I have found that my $HOME directory
is pointed at c:\documents and settings\owner and if I put
a copy of the _vimrc file there everything works. Now how
do I change the path to $HOME?

jerryd

Why do you want to change the path to $HOME? I would advise not trying to change. Is there something not working at this point? If it's reading the _vimrc file, I might just be satisfied and leave well enough alone.

If you want the _vimrc file somewhere else, run the :version command and see the other possible places to locate the file. It will read whichever one it finds first. On my system, it gives three options:

Code:

   system vimrc file: "$VIM\vimrc"
     user vimrc file: "$HOME\_vimrc"
 2nd user vimrc file: "$VIM\_vimrc"