FreeBSD-11, Mate, Terminal, Gvim

[James B. Byrne]

I recently replaced my CentOS-6 based workstation with a FreeBSD-11
system running the Mate desktop. Behavior of this environment differs
somewhat from what I am used to and I have run into one such situation
where this difference is a real inconvenience.

I log into my personal workstation with my personal, unprivileged
account.  I then run startx to get the mate desktop. My preferred
editor is vim and more particularly gvim.

When setting up new hosts I usually open an especially coloured
terminal instance and use 'su -l' to become root.  I also typically
edit using gvim.  However, this combination does not work for me on
FreeBSD with Mate as it did for me under CentOD-6 and Gnome2.  When
inside a terminal window as root instead of opening an Xwindow editor
when running gvim I get a 'E233: cannot open display' error.

Is there some configuration step that I am required to perform to get
this to work as I formerly experienced?


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James B. Byrne                mailto:ByrneJB at Harte-Lyne.ca
Harte & Lyne Limited          http://www.harte-lyne.ca
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Hamilton, Ontario             fax: +1 905 561 0757
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