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 hidden that match with one of the patterns in 'wildignore'.
• Extended syntax highlighting: files are highlighted with SpecialKey that match 'suffixes'
  (syntax match group netrwSuffixes)
• 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. There's also !, which starts the line off with a bang. 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.

Installation

If you don't have a preferred installation method, I recommend installing pathogen.vim, and then simply copy and paste:

cd ~/.vim/bundle
git clone git://github.com/tpope/vim-vinegar.git

License

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