Changing value of $MYVIMRC

Question

I store my .vimrc in my dotfiles repository located at ~/dotfiles/.vimrc, which I want to manage with Git using vim-fugitive. I have symlinks from my home directory to my dotfiles, i.e. ~/.vimrc -> ~/dotfiles/.vimrc.

I two problems with this:

• I can't do something like :edit $MYVIMRC, change something and run :Gcommit, as fugitive does not follow symbolic links. Via the symlink my ~/dotfiles/.vimrc opens when running the edit command, but fugitive commands are not available.
• In my .vimrc I define a number of autocommands that do use $MYVIMRC - some of them do no longer work, because they also have their troubles with the symlink.

Both problems could be easily fixed if I could change the value of $MYVIMRC, but I can't figure out how to do that. How can I change the value of $MYVIMRC?

I understand that I can also just ignore $MYVIMRC, i.e. replace it in all autocommands and not use it to edit my .vimrc, but this seems not like a good solution.

Answer 1

let command in vimL allows you to assign a value to a variable. A variable may be a environment variable, or a register or an option.

 :let $MYVIMRC=value

This command sets the value to $MYVIMRC. You can put this in .vimrc.

Example:

 :let $MYVIMRC=C:\Users\acer\Desktop