Can I make vim respect my .gitignore files?

Question

I was wondering if there is a way to get vim to read .gitignore files and use them to determine options not to present when auto-completing filenames.

For example, working in python, I'd like to not see .pyc files offered for editing. I think vim has its own mechanism for this, I was wondering how to load information from .gitignore into it.

Answer 1

Vim will ignore file patterns specified in option wildignore , so you can set them like so:

:set wildignore=*.o, *~, *.pyc

Or place the same line (without the ":") in your ~/.vimrc file. If you need something more dynamic like adjusting to the .gitignore in the current directory then you'll need to do some scripting, but I'll leave that as an exercise for someone else.

Answer 2

As suggested by @dwc, here's a vim script:

let filename = '.gitignore'
if filereadable(filename)
    let igstring = ''
    for oline in readfile(filename)
        let line = substitute(oline, '\s|\n|\r', '', "g")
        if line =~ '^#' | con | endif
        if line == '' | con  | endif
        if line =~ '^!' | con  | endif
        if line =~ '/$' | let igstring .= "," . line . "*" | con | endif
        let igstring .= "," . line
    endfor
    let execstring = "set wildignore=".substitute(igstring, '^,', '', "g")
    execute execstring
endif

Take that source and put it in a file in your plugin directory, such as ~/.vim/plugin/gitignore.vim. It will read your .gitignore file and parse it, transforming its format into one suitable for wildignore, and then set that option.

Limitations:

• This will read the .gitignore file from the directory where you launch vim. No effort is made to look for other .gitignore files and parse them. Alternatively, you could specify an absolute path to a file on the first line.
• The wildignore option in vim doesn't support the notion of negating ignores like you can in a .gitignore file. That is, you can't say :set wildignore=*.html,!foo.html to have it ignore all html files except foo.html. Therefore, .gitignore lines that start with ! are simply ignored.