# Cannot locate Vim directories after installation



## Ricardo (Apr 25, 2012)

Hello,

I'm a newcomer to FreeBSD. I've had the install disk for 9.0 laying around for a while now, and only last night fired it up and built XFCE4 on top on an old (2007) laptop I received as a hand-me-down. Please forgive my incredible ignorance in this subject matter; I'm a writer who has only really started delving into my tech hobby in the past 18 months, coming from years of exclusive Windows usage.

All I really want to use this device for is to acclimate myself to basic FreeBSD functionality so that I can decide if it merits more extensive usage in the future, and to do some light coding/programming. To that end, I wanted to set up Vim and run it in terminal and fire off completed code to whatever destination I had in mind via an SSH client.

I got as far as installing Vim and downloading Solarized--the color palette I wish to use--when I found that I couldn't find any directories within Vim, such as the colors directory to which I'd need to move solarized.vim in order for the palette to work.

`$ whereis vim`

Yielded the following results:

`$ whereis vim`

```
vim: /usr/local/bin/vim /usr/local/man/man1/vim.1.gz /usr/ports/editors/vim
```

The second one is an empty archive, and the third one is the ports tree repository. The only actual presence the vim installation has is the first result, which is an executable. What am I missing, or does the FreeBSD version of vim handle palettes a certain way I should know about?


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## SirDice (Apr 25, 2012)

http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized/vim-colors-solarized


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## Ricardo (Apr 25, 2012)

Thanks, but unless I'm missing something, I've read that over a few times and it assumes that Vim has directories-- .vim/colors in the case of the first install option, and .vim/bundle in the case of the Pathogen option. My problem is specifically that after installing Vim, I cannot actually locate any such directories.

On top of using the *whereis* command, I have browsed through my file system both in XFCE and through command line, and haven't found those directories. Am I going to need to reinstall Vim in some different way? When I performed the initial install, I did it via *pkg_add -r vim*. Vim itself runs fine, and I have the solarized.vim file, but no Vim directories to move it to.


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## SirDice (Apr 25, 2012)

They're using the ~/.vim/ directory. ~ is a shell shorthand for $HOME, i.e. your home directory.

A lot of applications can use user-specific settings. They're usually stored in your home directory and almost all of them start with a dot (.). These dotfiles are "hidden", they're not actually hidden but a normal ls won't show them. Use ls -a to list them too.


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## Ricardo (Apr 25, 2012)

I'll have to remember the -a modifier, it does indeed reveal some previously undisplayed files. However, the .vim directory isn't showing up. I verified that the Vim package was installed on my normal user account, but since I wasn't sure if it was a problem, I logged out of XFCE and switched to root. I *cd* into home, and this is what happens:


```
cd
# ls -a
.
..
.ICEauthority
.Xauthority
.cache
.config
.cshrc
.dbus
.history
.k5login
.local
.login
.profile
.xinitrc
Desktop
```

Of these, . and .. are not displayed with a normal *ls*. So, at this point it's looking like vim may not have built properly? Thanks again for your patience and assistance. Sorry this is going slowly.


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## kpa (Apr 25, 2012)

Installing a port or a package will not create any directories under your home directory, you'll have to create the ~/.vim directory yourself.


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## Ricardo (Apr 25, 2012)

Done, and the next logical step would be to create my .vimrc file, but searching around, I'm finding conflicting suggestions on where you make .vimrc. I'm seeing some sources say to build it in ~, others within ~/.vim.

Thanks SirDice and kpa for answering my newbie questions.


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## Lorem-Ipsum (Apr 25, 2012)

Ricardo said:
			
		

> Done, and the next logical step would be to create my .vimrc file, but searching around, I'm finding conflicting suggestions on where you make .vimrc. I'm seeing some sources say to build it in ~, others within ~/.vim.
> 
> Thanks SirDice and kpa for answering my newbie questions.



On my system my .vimrc is in my home folder and ~/.vim/ contains colourschemes, plugins and scripts.


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## Ricardo (Apr 25, 2012)

All right! With everyone's help, I've got Vim properly referencing solarized.vim! Thanks SirDice, kpa and Lorem-Ipsum for the assist, it's much appreciated.


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## SirDice (Apr 26, 2012)

Ricardo said:
			
		

> Of these, . and .. are not displayed with a normal *ls*.


For some additional information, a . (single dot) means the "current directory" and .. (two dots) means the "parent directory".

So a command like [cmd=]cd ..[/cmd] will move the current working directory one level up. And sometimes you need to reference the current directory, for example [cmd=]perl ./myscript.pl[/cmd]

Pretty basic stuff, play with them a bit. You're going to need that information a lot


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