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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