0001957: Standardize the -u option for ex/vi

ID	Project	Category	View Status	Date Submitted	Last Update

0001957	1003.1(2024)/Issue8	Shell and Utilities	public	2025-11-12 05:03	2025-11-12 05:03

Reporter	Love4Boobies	Assigned To
Priority	normal	Severity	Editorial	Type	Enhancement Request
Status	New	Resolution	Open

Name	Bogdan Barbu
Organization
User Reference
Section	ex, vi
Page Number	N/A
Line Number	N/A
Interp Status
Final Accepted Text


Summary	0001957: Standardize the -u option for ex/vi
Description	According to the current standard, the ex utility (and vi, implicitly) looks for .exrc in the home directory. It would be desirable to allow for other locations in order to allow users to have different initialization files for different tasks.
Desired Action	I propose that the -u option be standardized. This already exists in implementations like Vim and Neovim and does not seem to be used for anything else in other implementations that I've checked. It should specify a file to be used instead of the default .exrc file; if multiple -u options are specified then only the last one should apply. This is consistent with the mentioned implementations and is also very useful. For example, consider a user who wishes to keep their configuration files in accordance to the XDG basedir specification, which many programs today follow. They might do the following: alias vi='vi -u "${XDG_CONFIG_HOME:-$HOME/.config}/exrc"' If only the last -u option is used, they have the ability to override the alias.
Tags	No tags attached.

Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
2025-11-12 05:03	Love4Boobies	New Issue