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I've got a .vimrc and .vim folder I've been tweaking for a while, but on my machine at a new job, I've just installed ryanb's dotfiles (which contains config files for vim, git, and more). There are things I like in each config, so ultimately I want to combine them into a new personal config. Meanwhile, I'd like to be able to switch back and forth.

Is there an easy command for this in vim - "use the following .vimrc and .vim directory" - or would it be more straightforward to swap out the files themselves when I want to switch?

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The -u option will allow you to specify a configuration file other than ~/.vimrc, but there is no option to specify an alternative to the ~/.vim directory. However, you can have Vim use a different directory by modifying the 'runtimepath' ('rtp') option in each of your configuration files. For example, you could use this command

let &rtp = substitute(&rtp, '\.vim\>', '.vim1', 'g')

in one of your configuration files to tell Vim to use the ~/.vim1 directory rather than the ~/.vim directory.

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I'm guessing I can use this to keep everything in Dropbox :) – Michael Caron May 11 '11 at 15:03
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@Michael Caron - you can keep your .vimrc and .vim anywhere you like, as long as you have symlinks in your home folder to wherever you put them. Personally, I use this trick to keep all my configs in a .dotfiles folder, which I can sync to Github. – Nathan Long Oct 7 '11 at 20:15
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-u tells vim to use an alternate vimrc file.

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I recently learned that vim -u "NONE" opens vanilla vim, with no configuration. That can be useful if you've got a complex configuration and want to know whether some behavior is native to Vim or not. (This also works for MacVim - I haven't tried Gvim on Linux.) – Nathan Long Oct 7 '11 at 20:13
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