Re: $VIMRC over .vimrc ?

On Thursday, March 19, 2026 at 3:01:12 AM UTC-4 Igbanam Ogbuluijah wrote:

On Wed, Mar 18, 2026 at 10:12:49PM +0000, Gary Johnson wrote:
> On 2026-03-18, Eric Marceau wrote:
> > I did a little experiment:
>
> [...]
>
> I did something similar with terminal vim. I set MYVIMRC directly
> in my environment and set it in VIMINIT, also in my environment,
> before starting vim. In all cases, I could see both environment
> variables within vim and in the environment after shelling out of
> vim, but in no case was there any evidence of those variables
> affecting the vimrc sourced by vim at startup. The $MYVIMRC file
> did not appear in the output of :scriptnames and none of the
> settings made in that file were set in vim. The only vimrc sourced
> was the system vimrc, /etc/vim/vimrc on Ubuntu.
>
> It does seem like something is broken, because from vim's
> documentation, I would have expected the file specified by MYVIMRC
> to have been sourced.
>
> Regards,
> Gary
>
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It's not that something's broken; but there definitely is some
misconception.

What I think is going on is…

1. The top two places Vim searches for configuration are
a. a VIMINIT environment variable
b. Some VIMRC file
2. You can set an environment variable, VIMINIT; it should have Ex
commands in it.
3. If there's no VIMINIT, Vim searches some predefined paths to set
VIMRC.

I don't think VIMRC is an env variable Vim respects; I think it's an env
variable it sets based on where it finds a vimrc file.


~ Igbanam

These are the paths Vim looks for configuration files.

system vimrc file: "/etc/vimrc"
     user vimrc file: "$HOME/.vimrc"
 2nd user vimrc file: "~/.vim/vimrc"
      user exrc file: "$HOME/.exrc"
       defaults file: "$VIMRUNTIME/defaults.vim"
  fall-back for $VIM: "/usr/share/vim" 

In the documentation it states as mentioned above VIMINIT, also $MYVIMRC. This last part I will have to bring clarity too. 

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