Question

I am new at using vim daily. I am doing my best to setup an good environment. I work a lot with Django projects. And I want to simulate a project like setup when I edit a file inside a django project.

Let’s asume this directory structure:

/projects
    /django-app1
       manage.py
       settings.py
       .project
    /django-app1
       manage.py
       settings.py
       .project

What I want is place a file called .project that contains vim commands that will execute if I open any file whitin the directory structure

Why? Here is my vimrc https://github.com/mariocesar/dotfiles/blob/master/.vimrc#L151 you can see that I am using a snippet to load the virtualenv if it’s exist on the enviroment variables, it’s very cool but I don’t think is efficient to do that every time I open a file, or even better add some extra paths to sys.path, as I have projects with a site-packages directories.

So:

• How Can I detect a specific named file, looking down the current directory when open a file with vim?
• How Can I execute this file as a vim script?

Answer 1

There exist several plugins named local_vimrc that fulfil your need. Here is mine.

BTW, your question is a duplicate of Vim: apply settings on files in directory

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EDIT: Recent implementations of local_vimrc plugins use vim7 capabilities. Somehow, this is equivalent to:

source <c-r>=findfile('.local_vimrc',expand('<afile>').';')<cr>

(thanks sehe for reminding me of ‘;’)

“Somehow”, because, many important features are missing:

• the possibility to source all files found, in the downward order.
• the optional specification of a root directory pattern (like '$HOME\|/opt/projects/ for instance)
• external paths like scp://, ftp://, http:// must be handled correctly (I haven’t tested how they’d behave with findfile())
• it should be possible to force the execution of the local vimrc(s) before a template-expander plugin triggers the expansion of a templare-file (the typical application is the generation of header-gates in C/C++ .h files)

Hence my preference for the full plugin way, and not just a one-liner that will irritate us from time to time.

NB: my plugin is very old, it’s pre-vim7. As it works (recursively), I’ve never feel the need to rewrite it with the modern vim7 list manipulations functions.