tldr: I have read and followed GVim runs very slowly when editing files on a windows share but none of the suggestions worked.

I’ve been using Vim 8.1 on Windows for about 10 years, but since a few weeks ago it became basically unusable. Every single opening or saving of a file on a shared directory takes 15-20 seconds no matter what. The files I work on are usually R scripts of a few dozen lines. Here’s what I tried so far:

First, I moved my _vimrc to C:/Users/myuser/_vimrc. Started vim, and sure enough, it couldn’t source _vimrc any more (just to make sure it wasn’t reading from someplace else; this _vimrc dated from 2021).

Then, I added the VIMINIT environment variable with these contents: source $USERPROFILE/_vimrc. Started gvim, and all settings were back. So that worked.

Next I added this at the top of _vimrc, as suggested:

set directory=C:/Users/myuser
set backupdir=C:/Users/myuser
set viminfofile=C:/Users/myuser/_viminfo
let $HOME=$USERPROFILE
set noswapfile

I didn’t do anything about the vimfiles directory because I don’t seem to have one. And since during the actual editing there are no delays, I don’t think this has to do with MatchParen setting.

Anyway, everything takes ages. Needless to say that Notepad opens and saves files in a blink.

This is vim 8.1 on Windows 10 Enterprise, build 19045.4291. Administered by somebody else at corporate. I have no admin access.