Vim Save Changes With Sudo

Introduction

Sometimes, when you need to modify a file that needs root permission, you forgot to use sudo before open it using vim. This is quite annoying when you have changed a lot of lines, but you can’t save the modification.

Even though Vim has already warned us before editing using this line:

“W10: Warning: Changing a readonly file” — Vim

That doesn’t sounds like a warning, more like a not-so-threatening statement.

To avoid this problem, there are 2 ways that I know that may save your works too.

You Don’t Have Root Access Way

:w /tmp/my-modifications

You can save it to another file using :w <accessible-path>. Vim will write the current buffer to any path that you define there.

You Have Root Access Way

:w !sudo tee %

Then you will be prompted to type your password and the modification will be saved. :w !sudo tee % will pass the current buffer to sudo tee % command, where % is your current filename.

Conclusion

I believe this problem is annoying to you as well, I hope this article will find you.

Thank you for reading!

Originally published at https://clavinjune.dev on January 4, 2022.