A Blog Less Ordinary

The blog of Dave Ingram

GVim irritation

After some messing around, I thought I’d share a fix I’ve found for a problem I’ve been having with gvim on my home Linux machine.

Basically, the issue was that gvim would be missing the menu bar. My guioptions had “m” (display menubar) enabled, and $VIMRUNTIME/menu.vim was being sourced. No matter what I tried, the menu bar stayed hidden – it had vanished, and I couldn’t tell why. After some searching with various combinations of “gvim menu vanished” and similar, I finally ran across the solution…

It turns out that there is a configuration file in your home directory that controls some elements of visual display under GNOME. The directory I’m talking about is ~/.gnome2, under which there are a number of file. After editing ~/.gnome2/Vim, I noticed that it contained:

[Placement]
Dock=Toolbar\\0,0,0,0\\Menubar\\0,0,0,0

which looks fairly sensible, if incomprehensible. According to the post I found, however, it should contain this:

[Placement]
Dock=Toolbar\\0,1,0,0\\Menubar\\0,0,0,0

After making that change and restarting gvim, all is well once again. Anyone’s guess as to why.

7 Responses to GVim irritation

Christine says: December 12, 2007 at 03:43

Thank you! Had the same problem myself.

Adrian B says: June 16, 2008 at 19:10

Thank you very much. Just had this problem today for no reason whatsoever. Have been running gvim for years.
What did I do before the internet?

James says: December 30, 2008 at 20:16

Thanks! Wierd one, just started out of nowhere. Your solution fixed it.

john long says: January 30, 2009 at 15:13

thanks! this fixed my problem too using kubuntu hardy

they should put this in their faq perhaps

Tim says: April 7, 2010 at 18:03

This solution is still working. Thanks!
I hope I can remember this when it happens again.

Dave says: April 8, 2010 at 07:57

I’m glad this solution still helps people — and if you forget, this post will still be here 🙂

xavier says: June 14, 2011 at 16:05

Thank you, I had the same problem (and I use KDE).

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