Rooter
Rooter is a Vim plugin which changes the working directory to the project root when you open a file.
The project root is identified by the presence of known directory, such as a VCS directory, or file, such as a Rakefile. Out of the box it looks for git, darcs, mercurial, bazaar, and subversion, but you can configure it to look for anything you like.
Use
By default you don't need to do anything: vim-rooter will change the working directory automatically and echo the new working directory.
You can always invoke vim-rooter manually with <Leader>cd.
Configuration
You can change the manual-invocation mapping by adding this to your .vimrc:
map <silent> <unique> <Leader>foo <Plug>RooterChangeToRootDirectory
where <Leader>foo is the mapping you want.
To prevent vim-rooter from creating a mapping, do this:
let g:rooter_disable_map = 1
By default all files trigger vim-rooter. You can restrict the files by passing a comma separated list of extensions like this:
let g:rooter_autocmd_patterns = '*.rb,*.haml,*.js'
To stop vim-rooter changing directory automatically, add this to your .vimrc:
let g:rooter_manual_only = 1
You can set your own directory and file patterns like this:
let g:rooter_patterns = ['Rakefile', '.git/']
Vim-rooter checks the patterns depth-first in the order given. So to work correctly with git submodules you should have .git before .git/. All directories should have a trailing slash.
Setting your own patterns overwrites the defaults. You can use
let g:rooter_patterns = g:rooter_patterns + [ 'foo' ]
to append to the default patterns.
You can have vim-rooter locally change directory (:lcd) instead of
changing directory (:cd) by adding this to your .vimrc:
let g:rooter_use_lcd = 1
When vim-rooter encounters a non-project file, it won't change directory by default. If you would instead like vim-rooter to change to the file's directory, do this:
let g:rooter_change_directory_for_non_project_files = 1
This makes vim-rooter behave similarly to autochdir for non-project files.
If you don't want vim-rooter to echo the project directory, try this:
let g:rooter_silent_chdir = 1
Installation
Install into ~/.vim/plugin/rooter.vim or, if you're using Pathogen, into
~/.vim/bundle/rooter.vim.