Question

I just learned of vim’s gf command for navigating to files that are referenced in other files, such as c includes. I’m wanting to get this working within the Yii php framework, where files can be registered with the autoloader like this:

Yii::import('path.to.ClassName', true);

Using gf on ClassName has no effect because it’s not the real file path. However, it would be easy enough to translate it to the file path, which is path/to/ClassName.php.

Furthermore, there are other mechanisms within Yii that utilize path aliases, such as begining a widget, which looks like this:

$this->beginWidget('ext.widgets.widgetName.ClassName');

Where ext.widgets.widgetName.ClassName is an alias to somewhere, perhaps protected/extensions/widgets/widgetName/ClassName.php. In this case the alias ext is expanded to its full path at runtime, so vim cannot know the full file path.

Is there a way to overload/remap gf so within a php project it could either:

1. calculate the correct file path, then go to the file, or if file not found then
2. perform a tag lookup of ClassName?

Answer 1

See :help includeexpr. The example listed there for Java might suit your purposes:

:set includeexpr=substitute(v:fname,'\\.','/','g')

More generally, see :help gf and then follow the jumps to the settings that control it (like I just did :).