Scott Murphy

So this was bugging me for a while. Finally I decided to figure out what the heck was going on.

Whenever I wanted to edit a config file while not being logged in as root, I would sudo vi it but all the pretty colors would disappear. If I vi'd it directly without sudo, my vim profile would kick in and the colors would be there. If I logged in as root or su - and then edit the file, the pretty colors would be there....

So I then typed:

[root@lunch ~]# which vi
alias vi='vim'
/usr/bin/vim
[root@lunch ~]# sudo which vi
/bin/vi
[root@lunch ~]#

And alas, there was an alias for the root user (and also my local account), but there was no alias for vim as sudo.

Now, as far as I know, you can't get aliases through sudo by itself. Editing the root .bashrc file or /etc/bashrc won't work either.

The best fix that I have found is putting the following in /etc/bashrc
alias sudo='A=`alias` sudo '

Which sets all the aliases for that user prior to running sudo.

I read about the fix here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=217188