Vim settings file on Windows

Question

I can\'t believe I am typing a question for a simple thing like this but here we are. I can\'t for the life of me figure out what the exact name for the settings file is for vim

Answer 1

On Windows systems, the best way to find the value of $HOME is from within Vim, as follows. These commands are useful to see what directories your Vim is using:

:version
:echo expand('~')
:echo $HOME
:echo $VIM
:echo $VIMRUNTIME

Note the system vimrc file and user vimrc file paths displayed by the :version command. The system vimrc file can be created by an administrator to customize Vim for all users. In addition, each user can have his or her own user vimrc.

Answer 2

Why not just edit the vimrc file in vim itself and figure it out its name?. Using the following command.

:e $MYVIMRC

As ghiscoding mentions in a comment, you may need to run Vim as an administrator to be able to save your changes.

Answer 3

my _vimrc/_gvimrc is stored at C:/Users/<ME>/_vimrc and is working fine.

It's generally a good idea to keep personal settings separate from installation files.

To get more information about the search paths for your configuration files, type :he vimrc-intro.

And be careful: the docs say

For MS-DOS and MS-Windows you can use one of these:
$HOME/_vimrc
$VIM/_vimrc

While this is absolutely true, it could be a bit surprising that $VIM does not expand to e.g. C:/Program Files/vim/<your_version> (this is what $VIMRUNTIME holds) but only to C:/Program Files/vim/.

This said, C:/Program Files/vim/_vimrc should be read during startup.