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.