How to navigate in large project in VIM

Question

How do you manage big projects (hundreds of files) using only VIM?

I personally start having problems in any larger than small project.

• is there any way to quickly 'go to file', preferably with name completition?
• same for 'go to class definition', when it is in another file

I kinda know all the VIM basics, so I don't have problem using it for writing scripts or quick editing some source code. But it gets really messy for me when I have to navigate between files.

Answer 1

Opening vim from root of your source file and extending path option to include all sub-directories therein.
For example set path+=/usr/include/c++/** for C++ headers and set path+=** for your source directory.

This ,then, opens a plethora of following possibilities.

1) Opening file by name or parts of it

:find file_name

You can use auto-completion and wildcard expansion with :find reliably. You type the name, it will locate the name. This works language agnostic.I am sure you will like it.

2) Navigating to files under cusror:
if you want to go a file path like #include "project/path/classA.h.

gf or gF  - go to file under cursor.   

Ctrl-6 - to come back to last cursor position after gf or gF

3) API lookup and navigating to the API location

[i or [I can be used to look up your function signature for word under cursor without leaving your workspace. [<Tab> to actually go to declaration. Use Ctrl-6 to come back to last location.

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Without extending path, you can start navigating files by :Ex command and navigate and open your file. I prefer NerdTree over this though.

Answer 2

Starting in Vim 7.3, the :find command has tab-completion of filenames.

So if you set your 'path' option to contain your entire project (probably using the ** wildcard to allow recursively searching subdirectories), then you can use the :find, :sfind, :tabfind, etc. commands with completion to get to any file in your project. This also allows jumping to files directly with gf and friends if the file name is in your text, for example in an include directive.

With this method, no external tools or plugins are needed for navigating to specific files. Although, it may admittedly not be as fast or easy to use, and doesn't address the need for jumping to definitions. For definitions, I use ctags as other answers suggest.

Answer 3

I'm using two plugins of mine:

• searchInRuntime that completes filenames on command line. It is somehow similar to fuzzyfinder and lookupfile,
• lh-tags which is completely experimental and undocumented. It offers two features: automatic and quick update of the tagfile on file save(ing?), and a tag selector plugged to <c-w><m-down> by default. You may want to check the renowned taglist plugin instead.

Both require my viml library lh-vim-lib.

Answer 4

I use a combination of NERDTree (directory sidebar), FuzzyFinder Textmate (go-to-file like TextMate's CMD+T), and Sessions (:h sessions) to help me deal with large projects.

I would suggest using some sessions helper plugin. I would mention what I use, but I'm not satisfied with it yet. Just Google "vim sessions".

One thing to note with getting FuzzyFinder Textmate to work is that it depends on an old version the FuzzyFinder plugin, specifically v2.16. Anything higher and you'll get errors. But it's definitely worth the trouble. While it doesn't have name completion, its search is smart so if I search for fro/time/actionsphp it will pull up the file apps/(fro)ntend/modules/(time)_tracking/actions/(actions).class.(php) (parenthesis denote what it's matching). It makes it very easy to pick out files that are only unique by their folder name.

Answer 5

I use FindFile. If you open vim at the root of your project and run :FC . the plugin will cache all the filenames beneath your cwd. You can then do :FF to open a completion menu and type the name of the file you want (or rather, the first few letters).

Answer 6

As well as the invaluable ctags and the various associated commands. I also couldn't live without the project plugin, which allows you to have the files of interest associated with a project in a separate pane. I can't remember how much of my setup is customised, but if I want to open a source file called Debug.c, I hit:

<F12>     " Opens the project pane
/De       " Searches for "De", which is likely to be enough to find Debug.c or possibly Debug.h
<ENTER>   " Opens the selected file and closes the project pane

I often then do:

:vsp      " Vertically split the window
<F12>     " Reopen project pane
#         " Search back to find previous entry with the same name (to find
            Debug.h if I was on Debug.c: my headers are in Headers/ and
            my source is in Source/, so the headers come earlier in the list
            than the source).  I use * to go the other way, obviously.
<ENTER>   " Open the header file in the other window and close the project window.

With this relatively short sequence, I can open any file and it's header in a vertical split. Since the project plugin window is just a text file, completion is achieved by using Vim's searching capability.