I have a ~/.vimrc file that vim doesn\'t seem to be reading. There is a file at /etc/vimrc, and it looks like it is using that one.
My understanding is that the one
if you're on linux and want to know if vim is accessing your ~/.vimrc on startup you can launch it with strace:
strace -o vim_strace vim
then quit vim. Open the vim_strace file and search for "vimrc" in the file. you should find a line like that
stat64("/home/youruser/.vimrc", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=0, ...}) = 0
which mean that at least vim sees the file.