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It is not advisable to use sudo with a graphical application like gedit, as described at this link. Accordingly, I have tended to use vim with sudo.

Recently I noticed my ~/.viminfo was owned by root on a fairly fresh install of 16.04 (xenial) so it had me wondering if even vim is considered to be graphical or if there is some other problem with invoking sudo vim. After changing ownership to myself via:

sudo find $HOME -not -user $USER -exec chown $USER:$(id -g) +

and subsequently running sudo vim I was unable to have ~/.viminfo
owned by root, however, I am certain that it recently was owned by root.

Is it unadvisable to invoke sudo vim?

Yes, it is safe.

The problem with sudo gedit is because GUI apps use certain files such as ~/.cache/dconf and after elevated gedit that file becomes root-owned. Well, that particular file contains user-specific settings for GUI apps, including desktop, so if the system can't read those settings - it's bad. IIRC user can't start particular desktop. User's recent files data recently-used.xbel also gets affected.

On the other hand, vim doesn't have that problem. It uses no GUI-related database, and doesn't put anything into recently-used.xbel. It was created for console-only purpose, although gVim also exists. In fact, on some systems vim is your only choice of editor. So it is safer than gedit by virtue of not causing same problems. You're still editing as root in both cases, so you could cause problems with improper editing.

According to this blog :

The first time you use vim, the file '~/.viminfo' is created, and if you use 'sudo vim' the first time you use vim after installing it on a fresh system, the permissions on ~/.viminfo will have the owner set to root instead of the default user.

While author points out it can lead to issue, there's nothing complex - just chown the file back to yourself.

See also:

• What specific bad things happen when gedit is used with sudo?

It's fine to use vi as root. There's going to be times when you need to edit a file that requires sudo or root privileges, like changing your network interfaces file, or maybe editing your sshd config file. Using root for graphical stuff is bad because people would connect to IRC or browse the web as root. If they got a virus while doing so, it would have full root access.

The link is very old (2013). It recommends using gksudo or gksu for graphical applications but both of those are becoming obsolete. Later on the accepted answer also suggests sudo -H though.

The general consensus in the Ask Ubuntu community recently is to use:

sudo -H gedit /path/to/filename

The only problem remains that sudo doesn't have a profile for tab settings, extensions, word wrap, font name, font size, etc. You can inherit these from your user profile though with a wrapper script like this: How can I sync my root gedit with my user gedit's preferences?