How do I prevent vim from expanding ~ during completion?

Question

I'm on my macbook using vim, and let's say for simplicity's sake that I have ~/some_file.py, ~/some_other_file.py, and ~/user.py open. On the mac, ~ expands to /Users/<username>. So if I type in :b user and then hit tab to expand, it goes through each of the files instead of going straight to ~/user.py.

Is there any way to prevent this behavior?

Answer 1

I can't reproduce your problem under linux (tildes are not resolved in my vim's completion list, so :b home gives me ~/home.py before ~/some_file.py), but...

Try typing :b user then complete with Shift+Tab. In that case, my vim (7.2.442 if that matters) completes with the last match, which is what you want.

Answer 2

As it seems that it's not possible to change Vim built-in buffer completion, the only thing I can suggest (besides opening these files already being in the home directory) is to define your own :b command with desirable completion. It could be something like this:

function! CustomBufferComplete(a, l, p)
    let buf_out = ''
    redir => buf_out
    silent buffers
    redir END

    let buf_list = map(split(buf_out, "\n"), 'substitute(v:val, ' .
    \               '''^.*"\%(\~[/\\]\)\?\([^"]\+\)".*$'', "\\1", "g")')
    return join(buf_list, "\n")
endfunction

command! -nargs=1 -complete=custom,CustomBufferComplete B b <args>

(Note that it cuts off the ~/ part of a path before returning completion list.)