How to share one vimrc file among multiple clients?

Question

I am not a very orderly person at times and I often find myself in the situation of loosing my old fully tweaked vimrc file and having to start over all again. Or having different versions of vimrc files on different clients. Since this mess is getting out of hand for me, I would like to know if there is a good way of managing your vimrc file.

I now uploaded a vimrc file to a subversion server (Google Code) with the intention of maintaining that one. Yet, any other/better ideas are welcome.

EDIT: I found a nice solution: add the vimrc file to your SVN repository in a folder named Vim (same name as your local Vim program folder) and check this directory out on top of your Vim folder. SVN might complain a little about already existing files being present, but you can add those to the SVN ignore list. If you do that, then your active vimrc file is on source control. How cool is that?

Answer 1

Use git. I have my .vim and .vimrc files in a git repo, and I branch them for different systems. So i have on branch for lappy, one branch for debian-based , one for RH based etc.

I fire the repos up onto all my servers, and merge changes around as I see fit. Then, when i lose one, any of the others will serve. .vim/.vimrc are an excellent examples of files that should be in a DVCS.

Answer 2

I put these files in a source control system, subversion specifically, but it doesn't matter which. That gives me a history of all such configuration files, and it's just a matter of checking out the config file when I want the same one on a new/other machine or useraccount.

Answer 3

I keep a copy of my dot-files on google docs.

Answer 4

I use Dropbox. I've created a folder vim in my dropbox, which contains my .vimrc (actually: vimrc.vim) and colors, plugin, etc. directories.

Dropbox pushes all these files to all my computers (home, work, laptop, Bootcamp), so every time I want to change my vimrc, I can do so and I don't have to worry about copying it to the correct directory or checking out the file from SVN or anything. Everything happens automagically!

My actual .vimrc contains only what's necessary to load the stuff I have in my Dropbox. On OSX, it looks like this:

set runtimepath+=~/Dropbox/vim
source ~/Dropbox/vim/vimrc.vim

On Windows, like this:

set runtimepath+=$HOME/My\ Documents/My\ Dropbox/vim
source $HOME\My Documents\My Dropbox\vim\vimrc.vim

And that's it!

(Actually, I put the vimrc's above in my Dropbox as well, so I don't have to remember them whenever I set up a new computer or re-install an old one.)

I haven't actually tested this on Linux yet, but I see no reason why it wouldn't work. Especially if you use GNOME, for which Dropbox has a nice client.

The free version of Dropbox will give you a 30 day revision history, the paid one will give you full revision history.

Answer 5

Like others have said: use a version control system.

Here is such a project, easy to fork and extend: http://github.com/ryanb/dotfiles

It does not only handle vim.rc, but all kind of configuration and comes with a setup script.