Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 46

Save a File as the Super User

Running Vim as the super user isn’t normal, but sometimes we have to save changes to a file that requires sudo permission. We can do so without restarting Vim by delegating the task to a shell process and running that with sudo.

This tip may not work in GVim and certainly won’t work on Windows. It does work on Unix systems when you run Vim inside a terminal, which is a common enough scenario to make this tip worthy of inclusion.

Let’s use the /etc/hosts file to demonstrate. The file is owned by root, but we’re logged in with username “drew,” so we have permission only to read this file:

$ ls -al /etc/ | grep hosts
-rw-r--r--    1 root  wheel        634  6 Apr 15:59 hosts
$ whoami
drew

We’ll open ...