Linking the vimrc file in Windows

Using Vim on multiple machines and platforms is necessary when you have a geek crush on your editor like I do. Being able to have your settings and plugins follow you around on these various machines is invaluable.

For me, I keep all my vimfiles stored in a GitHub repo. That in combination with using pathogen as my plugin manager enables a ubiquitous experience regardless of the machine and platform I’m on.

For Windows the _vimrc file is stored in the user’s home directory. (i.e. c:\users\scott\_vimrc). Naturally, I want to use my vimrc file that is stored in my vimfiles repo (i.e. c:\users\scott\vimfiles\vimrc). For modern Windows installations, creating a symbolic or hard link is trivial using the mklink command. Yet, it’s something I always have to lookup in terms of syntax.

So for reference sakes, here we go:

To create a symbolic/hard link so that my _vimrc file points to the vimfiles/vimrc file I do the following:

cd c:\users\scott
mklink /h _vimrc c:\users\scott\vimfiles\vimrc

And there we have it. A joyous harmony where my vimrc file always points to the trusthworthy one I store in git.

Tootles.

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I'm a software geek living and working in Boulder, Colorado. Follow me on Twitter; you'll dig my tweets if you're into that sort of thing.

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