blueyed/vim-projectionist

projectionist.vim: project configuration

projectionist.vim

Projectionist provides granular project configuration using "projections". What are projections? Let's start with an example.

Example

A while back I went and made a bunch of plugins for working with rbenv. Here's what a couple of them look like:

~/.rbenv/plugins $ tree
.
├── rbenv-ctags
│   ├── bin
│   │   └── rbenv-ctags
│   └── etc
│       └── rbenv.d
│           └── install
│               └── ctags.bash
└── rbenv-sentience
    └── etc
        └── rbenv.d
            └── install
                └── sentience.bash

As you can see, rbenv plugins have hooks in etc/rbenv.d/ and commands in bin/ matching rbenv-*. Here's a projectionist configuration for that setup:

let g:projectionist_heuristics = {
      \   "etc/rbenv.d/|bin/rbenv-*": {
      \     "bin/rbenv-*": {
      \        "type": "command",
      \        "template": ["#!/usr/bin/env bash"],
      \     },
      \     "etc/rbenv.d/*.bash": {"type": "hook"}
      \   }
      \ }

The key in the outermost dictionary says to activate for any directory containing a subdirectory etc/rbenv.d/ or files matching bin/rbenv-*. The corresponding value contains projection definitions. Here, two projections are defined. The first creates an :Ecommand navigation command and provides boilerplate to pre-populate new files with, and the second creates an :Ehook command.

Features

See :help projectionist for the authoritative documentation. Here are some highlights.

Global and per project projection definitions

In the above example, we used the global g:projectionist_heuristics to declare projections based on requirements in the root directory. If that's not flexible enough, you can use the autocommand based API, or create a .projections.json in the root of the project.

Navigation commands

Navigation commands encapsulate editing filenames matching certain patterns. Here are some examples for this very project:

{
  "plugin/*.vim": {"type": "plugin"},
  "autoload/*.vim": {"type": "autoload"},
  "doc/*.txt": {"type": "doc"},
  "README.markdown": {"type": "doc"}
}

With these in place, you could use :Eplugin projectionist to edit plugin/projectionist.vim and :Edoc projectionist to edit doc/projectionist.txt. For README.markdown, since there's no glob, it becomes the default destination for :Edoc if no argument is given.

The E stands for edit. You also get S, V, and T variants that split, vsplit, and tabedit.

Tab complete is smart. Not quite "fuzzy finder" smart but smart nonetheless. (On that note, fuzzy finders are great, but I prefer the navigation command approach when there are multiple categories of similarly named files.)

Alternate files

Projectionist provides :A, :AS, :AV, and :AT to jump to an "alternate" file, based on ye olde convention originally established in a.vim. Here's an example configuration for Maven that allows you to jump between the implementation and test:

{
  "src/main/java/*.java": {"alternate": "src/test/java/{}.java"},
  "src/test/java/*.java": {"alternate": "src/main/java/{}.java"}
}

Bonus feature: :A {filename} edits a file relative to the root of the project.

Buffer configuration

Check out these examples for a minimal Ruby project:

{
  "*": {"make": "rake"},
  "spec/*_spec.rb": {"dispatch": "rspec {file}"}
}

That second one sets the default for dispatch.vim. Plugins can use projections for their own configuration.

Installation

If you don't have a preferred installation method, I recommend installing pathogen.vim, and then simply copy and paste:

cd ~/.vim/bundle
git clone git://github.com/tpope/vim-projectionist.git

FAQ

Why not a clearer filename like .vim_projections.json?

I don't see any reason to tie the concept of projections to Vim in particular. While some features (in particular navigation commands) are idiosyncratic to the way Vim works, others could make sense in a wide variety of editors.

License

Copyright © Tim Pope. Distributed under the same terms as Vim itself. See :help license.