Customised vimrc for subfolders and projects

configurationdirectoryvimvimrc

I use vim in many different contexts … actually, probably most people do: There is the editing of configuration files, programming, documenting, email and so forth.

I very frequently found myself wishing for a facility that lets me put a vimrc into a directory and whenever I start vim from within that directory a local vimrc gets read as well to make context specific adaptions. For instance:

a vimrc in etc to implicitly set/release locks and create backups before/on write
a vimrc for each of my programming projects for (for example) project-specific indentation and frequently used macros, e.g. Debian patch signature
a vimrc in every documentation directory for the docs language specific settings (spellcheck!)

This would not only help me myself, but also enable me/us to share project and task specific settings among many users in each of the described situations and ahve the configuration with the context where we want it applied.

This seems very sensible to me and not too difficult to have/implement. Does anybody know of a vim plugin or have a config that honors vimrc files found within working directories?

Best Answer

Central configuration

If it's okay to configure the local exceptions centrally, you can put such autocmds into your ~/.vimrc:

:autocmd BufRead,BufNewFile /path/to/dir/* setlocal ts=4 sw=4

On the other hand, if you want the specific configuration stored with the project (and don't want to embed this in all files via modelines), you have the following two options:

Local config with built-in functionality

If you always start Vim from the project root directory, the built-in

:set exrc

enables the reading of a .vimrc file from the current directory. You can place the :set ts=4 sw=4 commands in there.

Local config through plugin

Otherwise, you need the help of a plugin; there are several on vim.org; I can recommend the localrc plugin, which even allows local filetype-specific configuration.

^{Note that reading configuration from the file system has security implications; you may want to :set secure.}

Related Solutions

Temporary .vimrc

Suppose you have this other set of settings in /tmp/myvimrc. If my reading of man vim is correct you can start vim with this set of settings using the following:

$ vim -u /tmp/myvimrc

Thus, to make this an option for the rest of the session, I would create a function that sets this as an alias for vim. Thus, in bash I would put something like this in my .bashrc file:

function vimswitch {
    alias vim='vim -u /tmp/myvimrc'
}

Then, when I wanted my new vim settings, I would just run:

$ vimswitch

Note that I wouldn't store myvimrc in /tmp since this could easily be cleared out upon reboot. If you are using a shell other than bash this should still be possible, but the syntax could differ slightly.

Solarized color definitions in vimrc file

There are two problems:

The :highlight command does not evaluate ctermfg values as expressions. It accepts only a literal color number, or a color name (see :help cterm-colors). You get E421 because s:base00 is not a number, nor a valid color name.

You could use execute 'highlight GroupName ctermfg=' . s:base00 to build an command string and execute it (this is basically what colors/solarized.vim does); however there is an additional problem.
Variables that start with s: are script-local variables (see :help s:var), so they are not accessible in your .vimrc (or anywhere except the script in which they are defined: colors/solarized.vim).

The defining script “exports” the color values as a part of the highlight groups that it defines, but does not seem to export the individual cterm/gui values it uses for each Solarized color. If you want to create your own highlight group that uses these values, then you will probably have to edit it into your copy of colors/solarized.vim (though you may want to use s:fg_base00/s:bg_base00 instead of s:base00 since the former cover guifg vs. ctermfg so that your group would automatically work on both GUIs and terminals).