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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-28T20:28:03+00:00

I can’t believe I am typing a question for a simple thing like this

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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 on Windows (.vimrc does not work on Windows). And if I have names right (read the next para) then I don’t know why it is not picking up the settings from it.

I tried creating _vimrc and _gvimrc in the root directory where I copied the file from the example settings file that came installed with vim. I set the following command on top of the example commands:

set nobackup
set nowritebackup
set guifont=Courier_New:h11:cANSI

It is not accepting this file (whether it is named _vimrc or _gvimrc, I tried both) as the settings file as the font has not changed on the next start-up and still writes backup files.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    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.

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