I have a multitude of commands I'd like to run not in the current directory, but in the project root directory. i.e. going up directories until I reach some indication of a root, like .git directory for example.
For example running vimgrep -r (recursive) on all my project, or running tags generation recursively on whole project.
How do I get that path? The only close indication I found is this:set tags=./tags;~/Projects But that just saves the string as it is into tags. Assigning something similar but for the use case described, gets me the string verbatim.
Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Avoid the idea of "changing the working directory" or distinguishing between "working directory and project root", because almost no tool is prepared to properly handle those concepts.
The only tools that do (e.g. git) are those that don't care about the current directory to begin with.
Otherwise, it's madness to try to get everything working without bad side effects. "Working directory" is a concept too fundamental to even attempt to change within a running program.
The best approach is open a new Vim sessions inside directories where you want to do "local" things - and switch back to the "project" session to run project commands. Vim will protect you from accidentally overwriting changes in another session.
The alternative is to wrap commands in shells so they can have their "own" working directories, e.g.:
:!cd ../../..; ctags -R
(Which would allow you to regenerate tags file for the project, and not just the current dir)
or:
:!cd ../../..; grep -r foo **/*
But any output with file names would be relative to that root directory, and not the current one.
So you may prefer to do:
:!cd ../../..; vim
which creates a new Vim session within the current one, but in the context of the root directory.
Or, you may prefer the reverse (assuming Vim is running in the project root):
:!cd $(dirname %); vim
Which lets you work in the directory of the current file - and you'd have to exit to the main session to run project-wide tools again.
So instead of "changing" directories, you're "changing vim sessions" (either by having 2 sessions or "nesting" one in another like above).