Question

Is there a way to reference (or “source”) another user’s .vimrc file?

When I kuu (a variant of su that uses kerberos security tokens) to an admin user ID, I would like to use my personal .vimrc file.

I don’t want to overwrite the admin’s existing .vimrc file because the admin ID is shared by multiple users.

Answer 1

You can use the MYVIMRC environment variable. This way, you won’t have to pass -u each time you fire up vim. (You can of course do an alias instead, but that won’t help with e.g., vipw)

Keep in mind that .vimrc can execute arbitrary commands, if you use /home/user/.vimrc you may be creating a security issue (e.g., someone manages to compromise your user account, changes your .vimrc, and then gets root the next time you edit a file as root). You can, of course, keep a known-safe copy in ~root/ somewhere.

You could assumably even set something up in ~root/.bashrc to automatically set MYVIMRC to something different for each different administrator.