Help projectionist find .projections.json in new directories

[tandrewnichols]

I have an auto-mkdir thing for writing files in directories that don't exist, and projection templates are not applied to files in non-existent directories (and actually, vim-projectionist just fails to find .projections.json in this case). They are if I mkdir first though.

Example:

Projection

{
  "foo/*.js": {
    "template": [
      "blah"
    ]
  }
}

If I do vim foo/bar.js the template is used; if I do mkdir foo/bar/ && vim foo/bar/baz.js the template is used. But if I do vim foo/bar/baz.js by itself I don't get the template.

Here's why it matters: angular and react and some other frameworks advocate a directory-per-component structure, so any new component is in a new directory. Your structure ends up looking like:

components/
  foo/
    foo.js
    foo.html
    foo.test.js

so every time you create a new component you're creating a new directory. Which means I either never get the benefit of auto-mkdir (and have to type mkdir every time . . . I know, I know, first world problems) or I never get the benefit of a projection template.

This turned out to be because expand('<afile>:p') doesn't result in an absolute path in non-existent directories. This change fixes it by detecting non-absolute paths and prefixing them with cwd.

Thoughts?

[tpope]

Off the top of my head, this will have unintended consequences for unnamed buffers, URLs (ranging from http:// to fugitive://), and all things Windows.

My larger thoughts are that auto-mkdir just can't be done well in practice. If you do it on BufNewFile, every typo creates a new directory. If you do it on BufWritePre, the buffer is in many ways broken before the first save. Doing :e foo/bar|cd /tmp|w will create /tmp/foo/bar, almost certainly not what you intended.

My preferred solution to this is to have a command or command variant for creating the directory and file in one go. For example, in rails.vim, you can do :Emodel foo/bar! and mkdir app/models/foo will happen automatically if necessary. I haven't added something like that to Projectionist yet because the ! syntax is weird, and I haven't needed it enough to come up with an alternative. I'm thinking something like ++mkdir, which matches Vim's ++opt syntax, although it's a bit verbose.

[tpope]

Oh look what I found https://github.com/tpope/vim-projectionist/blob/9eff21e1bcb2db6fb5aadbd45886a98d2a397e59/autoload/projectionist.vim#L688. Guess I added support after all.

[tandrewnichols]

Somehow that link isn't going to the right thing for me. When I follow it, the version of autoload/projectionist.vim doesn't even have 688 lines. That aside, yeah, I figured there would be cases where my solution wasn't sufficient. Just wanted to get the conversation started. So you're saying this is already supported via :E<type> thingname? (like in my case, something like :Ecomponent foo/foo.js?)

[tandrewnichols]

Is this what you're referring to? https://github.com/tpope/vim-projectionist/blob/master/autoload/projectionist.vim#L601-L603

[tpope]

Yes that.