clean-path.vim

A clean way of adding directories and files to Vim's &path.

Rationale

As said in the article "Off the beaten path", the lazy way of setting Vim's path may actually harm the performance of common commands (:find, :tabfind, etc), and setting wildignore to remove some large directories (that pesky node_modules comes to mind) doesn't really do anything to reduce the performance hit. Quoting from the article, "&wildignore is only applied after the search, to build the list of candidate for :help wildmenu, it is only used for the wildmenu so it is only used for the :find family of commands."

That being said, instead of using the classic set path+=** hack to allow VIM to have it's own "fuzzy finder", this plugin only adds exactly what is needed to the path.

How it works

1. Find current git directory (doesn't matter how deep you're in the tree)
2. Read .gitignore from root git directory
3. Only add directories and files that are not present in the .gitignore

Notes

• If not in a git project, it'll simply use the the current directory .gitignore
• If no .gitignore is available, it'll populate the &path but not using **
• Deeply nested .gitignore in a git project are simply ignored
• The classic ! char is also ignored (otherwise some heavy logic would be required)

Install

Use your favorite plugin manager or dump the files below in their standard location:

on Unix-like systems...

    ~/.vim/doc/cleanpath.txt
    ~/.vim/plugin/cleanpath.vim
    ~/.vim/autoload/cleanpath.vim

on Windows...

    %userprofile%\vimfiles\doc\cleanpath.txt
    %userprofile%\vimfiles\plugin\cleanpath.vim
    %userprofile%\vimfiles\autoload\cleanpath.vim

How to use

" Append to path
let &path .= cleanpath#setpath()
" Overwrite path
let &path = cleanpath#setpath()

" Optional function, but useful for other plugins
" Append to wildignore
let &wildignore .= cleanpath#setwildignore()
" Overwrite wildignore
let &wildignore = cleanpath#setwildignore()

" Specify max depth for directories search
let g:cleanpath_max_depth = 1

Credit

This plugin was heavily inspired by a plugin that sets your wildignore based on your .gitignore, by Adam Bellaire (I was actually using this before reading the article).

Some coding was adapted from the reddit user kristijanhusak.

Thanks to romainl for helping me understanding a bunch about VIM. Check out some of the topics he covers!

License

This plugin was released under the MIT License.