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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-06T20:40:47+00:00

I have a few installs—notably Node, MacVim, and Taskwarrior—which I installed through the installers

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I have a few installs—notably Node, MacVim, and Taskwarrior—which I installed through the installers available on their websites. Now, having begun to grasp the incredible handiness of Homebrew, I’d like to transfer these applications into brew apps.

I think I could safely uninstall Node, but I’m not sure where all the files live. Trickier yet, I have settings and data for MacVim and Taskwarrior, respectively, in my .vim, .vimrc, and .taskrc files. Is is safe to just move those somewhere, then drop them back into place once I’ve deleted MacVim and Taskwarrior and reinstalled them via brew?

It’s just that everything works right now and I’m nervous that I’ll mess it up. Also, if this is a question better posed at Super User (or another forum), feel free to let me know and I’ll try to move it to the appropriate location.

Any help is appreciated. This is new stuff for me, but it’s pretty exciting.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Do .vim and .vimrc exist in your home directory? If so, you can just leave them in place; Homebrew won’t do anything to them and the new MacVim will pick them up automatically. If they are in /usr/local (which I doubt), you can move them and then move them back, I think.

    (Note that if you are a Ruby user, you might need to make sure the version of Ruby in your PATH is 1.8.7; rvm system if you use RVM, or brew unlink if you have a later Ruby installed with Homebrew. I just built MacVim with 1.9.2 as my active Ruby, and it just sort of freezes when I launch it.)

    I would assume .taskrc would work the same way if it’s in your home directory, although I haven’t used TaskWarrior.

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