Vim: apply settings on files in directory

vim

How do I specify Vim settings for all files under the current directory?

The ideal solution would be if Vim searched for and read a .vimrc in the current directory before searching for ~/.vimrc, and apply the settings there for the entire tree.

I've seen a plugin, but this means the applied settings aren't transparent since they require the plugin to be installed. In contrast, a modeline is transparent since regardless of a user's vimrc or specific vim invocation the modeline settings will be applied for that file.

Things I tried are

placing a .vimrc in the working directory
:so vimrc in the modeline.

I suppose both don't work for security reasons. I don't need the full power of a vimrc; being bound to settings acceptable by a modeline would suffice. My goal is to make it easier for vimmers to adopt coding standards in a project.

Best Answer

You can put something like this in $VIM/vimrc

autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead /path/to/files/* set nowrap tabstop=4 shiftwidth=4

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`.