I can't figure out how to uninstall Janus. I'd really like to just go back to plain VIM and MacVim. I could try to just remove the ~/.janus directory, but since Janus took a while to install I imagine there are other things and places where it installed stuff. Does anyone know a complete way to install Janus?
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Never used Janus, but (and this is really a guessing answer) why not just uninstall Vim and then install it again. Installation-wise, Vim is really rather self-contained: Vim in one, _vimrc+vimfiles in other place. – Rook Aug 21 '12 at 17:53
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7+1 for scraping Janus. – romainl Aug 21 '12 at 19:08
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@ldigas, installing and removing Vim won't help: Janus is installed in `$HOME` where the install process does nothing at all. – romainl Aug 21 '12 at 19:10
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@romainl - I ment uninstall Vim AND delete all Janus files. – Rook Aug 21 '12 at 19:36
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OK, my comment still applies, though, because Janus doesn't touch Vim in anyway. No need to uninstall Vim. – romainl Aug 21 '12 at 19:39
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@romainl - Yes, okey. You got a point there. – Rook Aug 21 '12 at 22:26
3 Answers
Janus is just a collection of vim settings and plugins which are stored in the ~/.vim
directory. Janus has a bootstrap installer that basically renames anything in that directory to whatever.old
and then clones itself into that directory. So the counter effect would be to delete anything that doesn't end in .old
and then take the .old
off of everything. You could accomplish this with these commands.
cd ~/.vim
find . -not -name \*.old -delete
find . -name \*.old | while read file; do mv "$file" "${file%%.old}"; done

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1This is not only a simple recipe, it's also a mini-masterclass in elegant Bash. Thanks for the inspiration! – Simon Dell Feb 02 '15 at 23:58
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I think the Janus install also creates some links that might need cleaning up: ~/.vimrc -> ~/.vim/janus/vim/vimrc ~/.gvimrc -> ~/.vim/janus/vim/gvimrc – MatrixManAtYrService Aug 10 '15 at 22:55
To uninstall janus, you can do this:
- remove ~/.vim, ~/.vimrc and ~/.gvimrc - You can keep the rc files if you need the customization.
- Remove ~/.vimrc.before and ~/.vimrc.after.
- Remove the ~/.janus/ directory
That should be all.
The above process will remove all your customizations etc and all the plugins as well. So, make sure you delete only what you want to.

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Actually, installing the janus
causes you to have new .vim
folder, new .vimrc
and .gvimrc
file which they are linked file to /Users/amerllica/.vim/janus/vim/vimrc
and /Users/amerllica/.vim/janus/vim/gvimrc
. Maybe .vimrc.after
and .vimrc.before
your have on your home directory.
Don't worry, the installation flow keep you previous .vim
path and the .vimrc
file on .vim.old
and .vimrc.old
file.
So without any doubt do below actions:
rm -rf .vim .vimrc .gvimrc
then:
mv .vim.old .vim
mv .vimrc.old .vimrc
mv .gvimrc.old .gvimrc // if you had installed Gvim
If you have .vimrc.before
or .vimrc.after
delete them by below commands:
rm -rf .vimrc.before .vimrc.after
Also, please do not forget to remove janus:
rm -rf ~/.janus
I hope, this answer helps you.

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