How to set a default (permanent) working directory in Vim

macvimvim

Possible Duplicate:
set .vim home directory to something specific

There is already a question about setting a working directory: How to set working/current directory in Vim? However my problem is a little different, I have several thousands files (several different projects) in a folder. Whenever I start Vim (MacVim), the cwd is by default set to home dir. Thus when I'm using plugins like ack.vim they by default are searching in my home dir which is useless. I just want to set it to my /home/user/Code folder (which has all my snippets, projects,etc..)

Is there any settings which sets the cwd to a certain directory? Or any workarounds (like executing :cd /home/user/Code for every startup in Vim?

Best Answer

You could just hard-code the current working directory via

:cd /home/user/Code

in your ~/.vimrc. But that leads to a strange setup whenever you edit files elsewhere. (And even if you're mainly editing inside your Code directory, there is the occasional edit of ~/.bashrc, or a config setting in /etc/..., and so on.

What I do is put the :cd into a local vimrc inside the Code directory. (I use the localrc.vim plugin; there are others.) Then, the directory is changed only when I actually edit any file withing that directory tree.

Use `\r` instead of `\n`.

Substituting by \n inserts a null character into the text. To get a newline, use \r. When searching for a newline, you’d still use \n, however. This asymmetry is due to the fact that \n and \r do slightly different things:

\n matches an end of line (newline), whereas \r matches a carriage return. On the other hand, in substitutions \n inserts a null character whereas \r inserts a newline (more precisely, it’s treated as the input CR). Here’s a small, non-interactive example to illustrate this, using the Vim command line feature (in other words, you can copy and paste the following into a terminal to run it). xxd shows a hexdump of the resulting file.

echo bar > test
(echo 'Before:'; xxd test) > output.txt
vim test '+s/b/\n/' '+s/a/\r/' +wq
(echo 'After:'; xxd test) >> output.txt
more output.txt

Before:
0000000: 6261 720a                                bar.
After:
0000000: 000a 720a                                ..r.

In other words, \n has inserted the byte 0x00 into the text; \r has inserted the byte 0x0a.

Best Answer

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Use \r instead of \n.

Related Topic

Use `\r` instead of `\n`.