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I am trying to retrieve the value of $MYVIMRC in my init.lua but I am coming up short because I don't understand what $MYVIMRC actually is.
It is not a global variable, is it?
None of these work:
vim.g.$MYVIMRC
vim.g.MYVIMRC
vim.g.myvimrc
What is $MYVIMRC and how can I access it from Lua?
$MYVIMRC is an environment variable that Vim adds to the current environment.
Environment variables are usually inherited by child processes from their parent process. For example, you can see $MYVIMRC in a shell that is a child process of Vim:
:!printenv | grep MYVIMRC
(I use this form rather than just :!echo "$MYVIMRC" to "prove" that the value is not inserted before the command is sent to the shell.)
I don't use lua in Vim but I know you can examine environment variables with os.getenv() so, for instance, this will print the expected value:
:lua print(os.getenv("MYVIMRC"))
In other words, you don't need any special Vim API to get the value.
This is already answered but I just wanted to add another way to access environment variables in lua using vim API.
vim.env.whatever -- will give you the value of whatever
vim.env.test = "test msg" -- sets env variable test to value "test msg"
I believe this way is more readable and more pleasant to script than using os.getenv
