vimrc - Setting vim options only for files in a certain directory tree?
2013-11
There is a programming project I work on where everyone else uses a tabsize of 4, so I find it most straightforward to set tabstop=4
in my ~/.vimrc
. However, I'd rather not have this affect every file I edit - just those for this project - let's say every file in a certain directory (and its subdirectories).
Is there a way I can easily conditionally set variables based on the directory prefix of the file?
Central configuration
If it's okay to configure the local exceptions centrally, you can put such autocmds into your ~/.vimrc
:
:autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile /path/to/dir/* setlocal ts=4 sw=4
On the other hand, if you want the specific configuration stored with the project (and don't want to embed this in all files via modelines), you have the following two options:
Local config with built-in functionality
If you always start Vim from the project root directory, the built-in
:set exrc
enables the reading of a .vimrc
file from the current directory. You can place the :set ts=4 sw=4
commands in there.
Local config through plugin
Otherwise, you need the help of a plugin; there are several on vim.org; I can recommend the localrc plugin, which even allows local filetype-specific configuration.
Note that reading configuration from the file system has security implications; you may want to :set secure
.
You can configure vim to read further commands using the source
(so) command.
Add this to your ~/.vimrc
- it searches the current directory and if .vimrc_proj file not found there searches for .vimrc_proj in the parent directory.
if filereadable(".vimrc_proj")
so .vimrc_proj
else
if filereadable("../.vimrc_proj")
so .vimrc_proj
endif
endif
Then add any custom commands in .vimrc_proj
config files to suit your projects.
You can use a plugin for Vim to solve the problem in a more general way by trying to detect the indention.
The plugin of choice for me is DetectIndent. It took some time for me to test all the forks of the plugin to find one that suits my needs. The original one was really close but not quite so I made my own fork.
For debugging it is very helpful to :set verbose=1
and run the plugin again with :DetectIndent
I seem to have a problem with my local Vim configuration but I'm not sure what it is. I need to override some filetype-specific settings. As per multiple tutorials/howtos, I created ~/.vim/after/ftplugin/cpp.vim
with appropriate setlocal
statements, but it seems not to be read. I checked that ~/.vim/after
is in runtimepath
.
I worked around this with autocmd FileType cpp setlocal ...
in ~/.vimrc
, but that is beyond the point. Any advice on how to diagnose/fix this? Or am I just overlooking something obvious?
Check the output of:
:filetype
You may need to add
filetype plugin on
to your .vimrc (or at least add 'plugin' to your 'filetype' setting).
A good place to start would be to use the :scriptnames
command. Open a C++ file however you normally do and execute
:scriptnames
This will show you the files that Vim has sourced since it was started.