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Vim: Weird OS X (10.5) Problem

I went to check something into Subversion using Vi (i.e. Vim) as my EDITOR, and I got the following:
$ svn ci
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: system('vi svn-commit.tmp') returned 256
Sure enough, even entering Vim and immediately exiting would return a non-zero exit status:
$ vi
$ echo $?
1
I read somewhere that this might be because of a bad plugin. Sure enough, the following fixed it:
cd ~/.vim
mv doc/rails.txt plugin/rails.vim ~/.Trash
Weird.
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Comments

Anonymous said…
Are you sure about the EDITOR?

$ env | grep EDITOR
EDITOR=vim

$ which vim
/opt/local/bin/vim
3:17 PM
jjinux said…
$ echo $EDITOR
vi
$ which vim
/usr/bin/vim
3:35 PM
jjinux said…
(And of course, /usr/bin/vi is just a symlink to /usr/bin/vim.)
4:25 PM
Anonymous said…
Thanks, Shannon - had the same problem and removing the rails plugin solved it.

Quite why the rails plugin would affect this is another matter...I initially put it down to a problem with the Leopard vim build as everything was hunky-dory under 10.4.

Now I can go back to doing SVN commits without using the "-m" option :-)
3:04 AM
Unknown said…
Why not just export SVN_EDITOR="vim --noplugin" instead of removing your plugins?
2:06 PM
jjinux said…
> Why not just export SVN_EDITOR="vim --noplugin" instead of removing your plugins?

Nice idea, although I still think Vim shouldn't be exiting with a non-zero status.
4:02 PM
Anonymous said…
You can also have this issue if your ~/.vim or ~/.vimrc directories are symlinks. I found this to be true using Vim 7.2
8:57 AM
jjinux said…
Interesting. I have a fuzzy memory of creating a symlink for something like .vimoutliner so that the actual files would exist inside the .vim directory.
10:51 AM
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