Recently one of my specific Vim need had surprisingly no simple enough solution.

The need I had is very simple: I needed a setting/flag to open Vim/Neovim in private mode. This was so that the cirtical files I opened left no traces to be recovered by a malicious program. I wanted the editor to open without any plugins, swapfiles, or backup so that it exited without a trace when its closed. Not even ability for the process to connect to Internet.

I wanted this to be a temporary setup for critical files alone. This can be acheived by explictly disabling swapfile, backup and undofile. It turns out that Vim/Neovim can accept commands via flags. Now, in addition to these I also wanted Vim to not load any plugins. Beyond the complexity that gets introduced via plugins, there is a real security aspect in today’s plugins as a bunch of them can & do send the contents of the file to external server. For example TabNine & Github Copilot.

I have packed all these settings into an alias that can easily invoke a private session of Neovim:

alias np='unshare -rn nvim --clean -n -c "set nobackup noswapfile noundofile"'

In addition to privacy, I am loving the speed of startup. Its makes one think, how much the plugins affect the startup time. Perhaps I need to review my vimrc and prune somethings to improve the speed. But thats for another post.