Why 'sudo vim' Could Hurt Your Productivity

2016-08-30 - By Robert Elder

The .viminfo File Is Created As Root

Updated 2016-12-11:  Made a correction to ownership changing command to make it work on a larger range of systems.

The first time you use vim, the file '~/.viminfo' is created, and if you use 'sudo vim' the first time you use vim after installing it on a fresh system, the permissions on ~/.viminfo will have the owner set to root instead of the default user.

That's a problem, because when vim is started as a normal user it can't write to this file, and every time you close vim it forgets:

• The last thing in the copy/paste buffer
• The last search term
• Any of your recent regexes
• Lots of other stuff

If you're a vim power-user you are probably used to pressing 'up' to get your last regex, or any other hard to type ex command:

Or you probably enjoy being able to open a file and press 'n' to jump directly do whatever you searched for last.  Instead you now get 'E35: No previous regular expression.':

Solution

Run this command:

sudo chown $(id -nu):$(id -ng) ~/.viminfo

More Details

When you use 'sudo', the current user changes, but the value of $HOME does not.  Since $HOME doesn't change '~' expands to '/home/user' instead of '/root', and root's .viminfo gets created at '/home/user/.viminfo'.  If you did 'sudo -i vim', then it would go to '/root/.viminfo' instead because the '-i' flag on sudo also changes the $HOME environment variable to be '/root'.

I felt this was worth sharing because it took me quite a while to figure this problem out.  It's the kind of thing that doesn't show up well if you Google for the symptoms, and I originally assumed it must have been related to different vim versions and just put up with it.  It wasn't until I did a bit more digging that I realized it was so easily fixable all this time!

2021-12-21 Update

I recently received an email suggesting that making a habit of using 'sudoedit' instead of 'sudo vim' would eliminate this problem entirely.  I attempted to verify this alternative solution, but I found that now in my version of Ubuntu 20.04 the original problem for which I wrote this article no longer seems to happen.  Specifically, using 'sudo vim' no longer seems to cause the same permissions based problem.  In addition, I also noted that 'sudoedit' on my system appears to be symlinked to 'sudo' so it may not make a difference on my system, but I will include this note for completeness since it may make a different on other *nix systems.

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