How to use the .vimrc file in Cygwin

cygwinvim

I just installed Cygwin on my work machine and would like to use the .vimrc file I use on my Linux box at home.

Is that possible, or does it need to have Cygwin-specific settings?
Where would I put the .vimrc file?

I'm a little unsure of what directory I'm being dropped into at the bash prompt under Cygwin, but I think I'd create a subdirectory called .vim there, right?

Best Answer

I launched vi as vi -V and got this:

chdir(/cygdrive/c/Users/johntron)
chdir(/etc)
chdir(/cygdrive/c/Users/johntron)
could not source "/etc/virc"
chdir(/cygdrive/c/Users/johntron)
chdir(/cygdrive/c/Users/johntron)
chdir(/cygdrive/c/Users/johntron)
could not source "$HOME/.virc"
chdir(/cygdrive/c/Users/johntron)
chdir(/cygdrive/c/Users/johntron)
chdir(/cygdrive/c/Users/johntron)
could not source "$HOME/.exrc"

Realizing vi was looking for .virc and not .vimrc like all the other *nix systems I've ever used, I just ran this to fix the problem:

cp ~/.vimrc ~/.virc

... or if if you've configured symlinks:

ln -s ~/.vimrc ~/.virc

I'm pretty sure this was a problem, because Cygwin installs vi, and not vi improved; however, the loading screen if you launch vi with no parameters still says vi improved. Regardless, I installed vim via setup.exe and running vim (not vi) does indeed try to load ~/.vimrc as expected. You can simply add an alias vi=vim to your ~/.profile to use the improved version by default.

Use `\r` instead of `\n`.

Substituting by \n inserts a null character into the text. To get a newline, use \r. When searching for a newline, you’d still use \n, however. This asymmetry is due to the fact that \n and \r do slightly different things:

\n matches an end of line (newline), whereas \r matches a carriage return. On the other hand, in substitutions \n inserts a null character whereas \r inserts a newline (more precisely, it’s treated as the input CR). Here’s a small, non-interactive example to illustrate this, using the Vim command line feature (in other words, you can copy and paste the following into a terminal to run it). xxd shows a hexdump of the resulting file.

echo bar > test
(echo 'Before:'; xxd test) > output.txt
vim test '+s/b/\n/' '+s/a/\r/' +wq
(echo 'After:'; xxd test) >> output.txt
more output.txt

Before:
0000000: 6261 720a                                bar.
After:
0000000: 000a 720a                                ..r.

In other words, \n has inserted the byte 0x00 into the text; \r has inserted the byte 0x0a.

Vim: apply settings on files in directory

You can put something like this in $VIM/vimrc

autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead /path/to/files/* set nowrap tabstop=4 shiftwidth=4

Best Answer

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How to replace a character by a newline in Vim

Use \r instead of \n.

Vim: apply settings on files in directory

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Use `\r` instead of `\n`.