FreeBSD-11, Mate, Terminal, Gvim

[Polytropon]

On Tue, 25 Jul 2017 10:39:29 -0400, James B. Byrne via freebsd-questions wrote:
> 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.

This is to be expected.

With "su -l", a full login is simulated, so all environmental
variables will be reset - but $DISPLAY is needed for X. There
are basically two solutions:

1. Set $DISPLAY accordingly, for example to :0.0. Refer to the
   documentation of your shell on how to do it, for example in
   C shell "setenv DISPLAY :0.0", in sh/bash "export DISPLAY=:0.0".

2. Use "su -m" instead, which will preserve the environment of
   your user, and $DISPLAY will be kept set.

See "man su" for details.




-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...