Question

I’m working with several files in gvim in Windows 7. I need to test the files (Python scripts) in linux. So apart from their original location I want to also save the files in a folder called linux. I want to do this with new files that I will be creating/modifying. That’s why I want to use a mapping with the % sign to get the name of the current file Into the new path.
The problem I’m having is that the % sign is escaped with a backslash, so this doesn’t work :

:w C:\projects\linux\%:t

Being the original location:

C:\projects\foo\

Is there a simple way to just save the current file in a different folder? (I have read that the % sign is a filename character, so I could erase it from the string isfname and it should work but I think I am making it more complicated than what it really is.)

Answer 1

You might be able to do this sort of thing fairly automatically using the autocmd feature.

The following (untested) line in your platform’s equivalent of ~/.vimrc will update a copy of a file when gvim makes modifications:

" clear commands
autocmd!
" when writing buffers, save a copy -- see :help filename-modifiers
autocmd BufWritePost c:/path/to/source/directory w %:t

The :t will take just the tail of the pathname; if you’re working with multi-level directories, perhaps :p:. would be better. See the documentation for more details.