Question

I have a ~/.vimrc file that vim doesn’t seem to be reading.
There is a file at /etc/vimrc, and it looks like it is using that one.

My understanding is that the one in the home directory should override this one, shouldn’t it?

Update

cat vim_strace | grep .vimrc
    stat64("/etc/vimrc", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1438, ...}) = 0
    open("/etc/vimrc", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 3
    stat64("/etc/vimrc", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1438, ...}) = 0
    stat64("/root/.vimrc", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=35, ...}) = 0
    open("/root/.vimrc", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 3
    stat64("/root/.vimrc", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=35, ...}) = 0

Answer 1

if you’re on linux and want to know if vim is accessing your ~/.vimrc on startup you can launch it with strace:

strace -o vim_strace vim

then quit vim.
Open the vim_strace file and search for “vimrc” in the file. you should find a line like that

stat64("/home/youruser/.vimrc", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=0, ...}) = 0

which mean that at least vim sees the file.