Use sudo with .vimrc

Question

I'm using CentOS and created a .vimrc file in my /home directory. I tested it out by creating a txt file and yes, that worked fine. Now, I have my project files in my /srv directory with SELinux turned on. I tried opening a file: vim README.txt and yes, my .vimrc settings are still being applied.

Now, since I'm in the /srv directory, simply doing vim means that my file is read only. So, I do sudo vim README.txt in order to be able to edit files. Now, the problem lies that once I do sudo, none of my .vimrc settings are applied. I tried creating a copy of .vimrc in the /srv folder but that didn't work either.

How do I apply .vimrc settings while using sudo?

Answer 1

Use sudoedit instead of sudo vim. You should be doing that anyway. Make sure your EDITOR environment variable is set to vim (probably already is, or vim is the default; you can set it in your .profile analog if need be).

Answer 2

As shown here, you can use the following:

sudo -E vim README.txt 

From the man page:

-E    The -E (preserve environment) option indicates to the security policy that the user wishes to preserve their existing environment variables.  The   security policy may return an error if the -E option is specified and the user does not have permission to preserve the environment. 

The accepted answer is the most secure. But this one is more flexible as I can use sudo -E operation with any operation, I don't have to configure anything else beforehand.