Vim: Goto File
Vim has an awesome feature that I think is not shown off enough. It’s pretty easy to use and configure, but thankfully many languages have a sensible configuration out of the box.
Vim has this feature that opens a file when you press gf over a filename. On the face of it, it’s only sort of useful. There are a couple settings that make this feature incredibly handy.
🔗 path
First and foremost, you have to set your path. Typically when you open a Perl script or module in vim, the path is set to something like this:
$(pwd)/usr/include$PERL5LIB- And Perl’s default
@INC
It’s a good idea to add the path of your current project, for example:
:set path+=lib
So on a typical Linux system, you can type out zlib.h and press gf over it
and pull up the zlib headers. The next feature is what really makes it
powerful.
🔗 suffixesadd and includeexpr
The more basic of the two options is
suffixesadd.
It is simply a list of suffixes to attempt to add to the filename. So in the
example above, if you :set suffixesadd=.h and then type zlib and then press
gf on the word, you’ll pull of the header files for zlib. That’s too basic
for most modern programming environments though. Here’s the default
includeexpr
for me when I open a perl script:
substitute(substitute(substitute(v:fname,'::','/','g'),'->*','',''),'$','.pm','')
Let’s unpack that to make sure we see what’s going on. This may be subtly incorrect syntax, but that’s fine. The point is to communicate what is happening above.
to_open = v:fname
# replace all :: with /
to_open = substitute(to_open,'::','/','g')
# remove any method call (like ->foo)
to_open = substitute(to_open,'->*','','')
# append a .pm
to_open = substitute(to_open,'$','.pm','')
With the above we can find the filename to open. This is the default. You can
do even better, if you put in a little effort. Here is an idea I’d like to try
when I get some time, call a function as the expression, and in the function, if
the fname contains, ->resultset(...) return the namespaced resultset. I’d
need to tweak the
ifsname to
allow selecting weird characters, and maybe that would be more problematic than
it’s worth, but it’s hard to know before you try. Could be really handy!
Even if you don’t go further with this idea, consider using gf more
often. I personally use it (plus CTRL-O as a “back” command”) to browse repos
and even the Perl modules they depend on.
(The following includes affiliate links.)
If you’d like to learn more, I can recommend two excellent books. I first
learned how to use vi from
Learning the vi and Vim Editors
Second, if you really want to up your editing game, check out
Practical Vim
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