Question

I want vim to save folded code after I’ve closed the file. I’ve added the following code to both /etc/vimrc and ~/.vimrc:

au BufWinLeave ?* mkview
au BufWinEnter ?* silent loadview

When I open a file as a regular user (vim file) it works as expected. If I instead open with sudo vim file it doesn’t save folded code.

I know /etc/vimrc is being read. My theme is set at the bottom of that file and is working fine. I ran into a similar problem last week installing the vim surround plugin. When that was installed in ~/.vim it only applied to vim file. To get it working with sudo I had to install it separately in /usr/share/vim/current. What could be causing this?

Answer 1

Prolog

In fact you answered your question, so this is indeed the same issue you had before. It is caused by the algorithm Vim uses to find its configuration (see :help initialization). But I wouldn’t call your solution a correct one. See :help $VIM for information how you can use your configuration in sudo environment (e.g. being root).

As for your current issue.

See the following quotes from the documentation. :help :mkview:

:mkvie[w][!] [file] ...
        When [file] is omitted or is a number from 1 to 9, a
        name is generated and 'viewdir' prepended.
                    ...

And :help 'viewdir':

 'viewdir' 'vdir'   string (default for ... for Unix: "~/.vim/view", ...

So after doing sudo all views are stored by Vim at /root/.vim.

Solution

Make viewdir point to your ~/.vim/view directory, with something like the following in /root/.vimrc:

:set viewdir=/home/user/.vim/view

Though, this approach has some issues itself:

1. Updating views saved by root will cause permission errors.
2. You wont be able to pass stored views for files under /root or /home/user, because Vim generates file names with tilde instead of full paths.

The first issue can be solved by running chown or chmod on new view file right after executing :mkview command. It should be something like:

execute '!chown user:group' eval('&viewdir').'/'.substitute(expand('%:p:~'), '/', '+=', 'g').'='

But I don’t know good solution for the second issue, can only suggest writing a script to convert file names to full paths.