Using a session-specific .vimrc

Question

I share accounts with other developers for test environments. The .vimrc on some of these accounts sets rows and columns, changing my terminal size, which drives me nuts.

Is there a way I can set a temporary, "session-specific" .vimrc?

I imagine it being used like

% source ~acheong/.vimrc

and then all subsequent vim instances in that session using this personal .vimrc. (But of course, the above won't work.)

Answer 1

You can start vim with a configuration file other than ~/.vimrc by using the -u option like this:

vim -N -u ~acheong/.vimrc

To avoid typing that each time, you could define an alias for it each time you log in to one of those accounts:

alias vim='vim -N -u ~acheong/.vimrc'

See

:help -u
:help initialization

Answer 2

Use the -u option to pass in a temporary .vimrc that will override the default. From the man:

-u {vimrc}

Use the commands in the file {vimrc} for initializations. All the other initializations are skipped. Use this to edit a special kind of files. It can also be used to skip all initializations by giving the name "NONE". See ":help initialization" within vim for more details.

i.e: vim -u ~acheong/myvimrc

Answer 3

Maybe are you searching for the so command ?

Moreover, how are you connecting to the shared session ? In case of a sudo, you can for instance use so ~$SUDO_USER/.vimrc.