gvim — E303: Unable to open swap file for “[No Name]“, recovery impossible
vim is my editor of choice and I install it in Windows. All is working quite good except one little annoyance — when I open the editor fresh and started editing by going into insert mode, it will give this error message:
1 | E303: Unable to open swap file for "[No Name]", recovery impossible |
This is usually harmless, as soon as I save the file everything would be great, it’s just that 1 – 2 seconds of pause that doesn’t make me feel good, so today I tried to pin down the problem and here’s how it went:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | :help E303 (So it's related to the swap file. Let's see where our swap file fails to be created.) :set directory? directory=.;c:\tmp;c:\temp (Oh, those are the default %TEMP% which I moved to another drive! But anyway, the first priority should be the current directory. So let's see where we're now) :pwd C:\Windows\system32 |
Solution
OK it’s pretty obvious now. It probably needs a little bit of manual fixing. Let’s put this in our .vimrc
1 2 3 4 5 | " Thanks for an anonymous guest to provide this generic, better solution set directory=.,$TEMP " This is line I used at first. The above line is better than this set directory=.,d:\temp |
Great, problem solved!