Is there a way to start vim in read only mode
See $ vim --help
for Vim's many launch arguments.
For launching Vim in read only mode that would be:
$ vim -R filename
EDIT
$ view
and $ vim -R
seem to be one and the same by way of symbolic links. I'm not sure what features you'll gain from running $ vim -R
that you don't have with $ view
.
Here, on Ubuntu, I can visually select stuff in both.
If you forgot the -R
option when start up vim
, you can use:
:set ro
If your goal is simply not to overwrite the original file, you can vim's read from stdin feature:
cat filename | vim -