vinegar.vim

Split windows and the project drawer go together like oil and vinegar. I
don’t mean to say that you can combine them to create a delicious salad
dressing. I mean that they don’t mix well!

• Drew Neil

You know what netrw is, right? The built in directory browser? Well,
vinegar.vim enhances netrw, partially in an attempt to mitigate the need for
more disruptive “project drawer” style plugins.

Some of the behaviors added by vinegar.vim would make excellent upstream
additions. Many, the author would probably reject. Others are a bit too wild
to even consider.

• Press - in any buffer to hop up to the directory listing and seek to the
  file you just came from. Keep bouncing to go up, up, up. Having rapid
  directory access available changes everything.
• All that annoying crap at the top is turned off, leaving you with nothing
  but a list of files. This is surprisingly disorienting, but ultimately
  very liberating. Press I to toggle until you adapt.
• The oddly C-biased default sort order is replaced with a sensible application
  of 'suffixes'.
• File hiding: files are not listed that match with one of the patterns in
  'wildignore'.
  If you put let g:netrw_list_hide = '\(^\|\s\s\)\zs\.\S\+'
  in your vimrc, vinegar will initialize with dot files hidden.
  Press gh to toggle dot file hiding.
• Press . on a file to pre-populate it at the end of a : command line.
  This is great, for example, to quickly initiate a :grep of the file or
  directory under the cursor. Type .!chmod +x and
  get :!chmod +x path/to/file.
• Press y. to yank an absolute path for the file under the cursor.
• Press ~ to go home.
• Use Vim’s built-in CTRL-^ (CTRL-6) for switching back to the previous
  buffer from the netrw buffer.

Installation

Install using your favourite package manager, or use Vim’s built-in package support:

mkdir -p ~/.vim/pack/tpope/start
cd ~/.vim/pack/tpope/start
git clone https://github.com/tpope/vim-vinegar.git

Promotion

Like vinegar.vim? Star the repository on
GitHub and vote for it on
vim.org.

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GitHub and
Twitter.

License

Copyright © Tim Pope. Distributed under the same terms as Vim itself.
See :help license.