Wednesday, October 23, 2019

Linux: Easy solution vim caught deadly signal segv vim preserving files vim finished

Ran into this irritating problem when everything was initially working fine on my system.

I had copy pasted something into the command window by mistake which caused vi to crash and keep spitting this out. I am using a Fedora version.

Thing that I tried which did not work:
1. Rebooting
2. Uninstalling and reinstalling vi

Solution: Under your home directory there is a file .viminfo which contains all the cached vi information. Delete this file. It will get recreated afresh the  next time vi starts. Just deleting this file fixed the problem for me.