Cannot set swap, backup, and viminfo in vimrc (win64)

Question

Folks: I have searched stackoverflow and other databases for the answer to this. I thought that a number of threads would have resolved it by now, but without luck.

I have attempted to set all three of these parameters using

set dir = c:\\tmp
set bdir = c:\\tmp
set viminfo +=nc:\\tmp\\viminfo

I thought that perhaps the name of the file was incorrect. I tried them in a newly created vimrc, _vimrc, and .vimrc (+ gvimrc...) in my $VIM (I don't want any of these files in the working directory, or in $HOME). These attempts did not work-- checking settings showed that after starting vim after these vimrc changes were made did not affect the settings.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Remove the spaces around the equals sign. The spaces are not part of the syntax for set and set thinks you are sending in 3 parameters instead of one.

The commands below should work.

set dir=c:\\tmp
set bdir=c:\\tmp
set viminfo+=nc:\\tmp\\viminfo

Also the proper place for these commands are in your vimrc file which would be located at $HOME/_vimrc

Answer 2

I used to use something like this which worked well:

set backup
set backupdir=$VIMRUNTIME/temp//
set directory=$VIMRUNTIME/temp//

Try forward slashes?