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Asked: 2026-05-30T04:43:49+00:00

I’m having difficulty getting MacVim (7.3-64) to recognize my .vimrc and .gvimrc files since

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I’m having difficulty getting MacVim (7.3-64) to recognize my .vimrc and .gvimrc files since upgrading to OS X 10.7.3. Previous, I’ve simply symlinked my .vimrc and .gvimrc using these commmands:

$ ln -s ~/.vim/vimrc /usr/local/Cellar/macvim/7.3-57/MacVim.app/Contents/Resources/vim/.vimrc 

$ ln -s ~/.vim/gvimrc /usr/local/Cellar/macvim/7.3-57/MacVim.app/Contents/Resources/vim/.gvimrc

However, when I currently symlink my rc files, I can not get MacVim to recognize them. I’ve installed MacVim via Homebrew. Does anyone have any suggests as to what the problem could be?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The ~/.vim/ folder (for colorschemes and scripts) and the ~/.vimrc file (for custom settings and mappings) are guaranteed to work on every UNIX-like systems but neither of these are required for Vim (and MacVim) to work properly.

    1. Start without symlinks or whatever : no .vim folder and no .vimrc or .gvimrc in your home folder. Does MacVim work? You are supposed to see a window with some introductory text, do you see that?

    2. Quit MacVim and turn to the original .(g)vimrc files you want to use: where are they located? Where did you get them from? What is their content? Do you actually, really need them? Do their names actually start with a dot (do you see them or not in the Finder)? What is their encoding (in vim, :set fileencoding? and in the terminal, $ file /path/to/original/.vimrc)? Please, paste the content of the .vimrc file you want to use in your question.

    3. If you are absolutely certain you need these files to work efficiently in Vim and assuming you actually have a custom .vimrc somewhere on your Mac, open Terminal.app and type this command (without the $):

      $ cp /path/to/original/.vimrc ~/.vimrc

      to copy your .vimrc to the canonical location.

      Now launch MacVim. What do you see? You are supposed to see a window with some introductory text, is that what you see?

    4. If MacVim doesn’t work correctly with your ~/.vimrc you might want to comment its content, relaunch MacVim, uncomment a few lines and so on until you eventually find a bad setting.

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