gvim — E303: Unable to open swap file for “[No Name]“, recovery impossible

kizzx2 — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:58:56 +0000

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:

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: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

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" 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!

Code for Concinnity » e303

gvim — E303: Unable to open swap file for “[No Name]“, recovery impossible

Solution