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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-10T12:42:11+00:00

In an .vimrc file, is it possible to only execute an autocmd if the

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In an .vimrc file, is it possible to only execute an autocmd if the file is loaded from a particular directory?

In MacVim, i have a line of code in my .vimrc which automatically cds to the directory that contains the file i am editing – however it causes an error when i access the git files that :Gedit creates (vim package fugitive).

The autocmd is:

autocmd BufEnter * execute "chdir ".escape(expand("%:p:h"), ' ')

The error is: 

Error detected while processing BufEnter Auto commands for "*":

From :echo expand("%") it is clear that Fugitive creates paths that begin with fugitive:///, so i am trying to figure out how to test if the first 12 characters of a file’s path == fugitive:///

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Hmm, I think I’ve misunderstood. Your are changing the directory in the shell, not in Vim, don’t you? In that case, autochdir won’t be enough.

    :Gedit creates a temporary file with a funky name:

    :e vimrc
:Gedit ~2
:echo expand("%")
fugitive:///home/romainl/.vim/.git//8aece3dc3c19522c33c997bc82a2487e3bdf013b/vimrc
:echo expand("%:p:h")
fugitive:///home/romainl/.vim/.git//8aece3dc3c19522c33c997bc82a2487e3bdf013b/

    There’s no way your shell is going to cd to that “directory” because it is not a valid path.

    However, I have set autochdir which tells vim to cd automatically to the directory containing the current file. Thanks to that I can see that the temporary file is in:

    :pwd
/tmp/vGiSmH2

    I could use the output of :pwd to cd there.

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