Inserting a custom file path in vim

OK – so I use CodeIgniter as my PHP framework and one of the things that (I kind of like) is the addition of a special PHP comment that they add to the end of their files:

I keep all of my projects in folders like this:
/home/jon/public_html/<project name>/<project files and folders>

Apache is configured as a local server with virtual hosts (I’ll post on that later)

For a CodeIgniter project, the controllers folder would be:
/home/jon/public_html/<project name>/application/controllers

So I wanted to have a quick way to add the code snippet to the end of the file with a quick couple of keystrokes.

Rather than mess with insert mode mapping – I decided to use the snipMate vim plugin (VERY  handy, by the way).

I added this snippet into ~/.vim/snippets/php.snippet

snippet cifooter

“What does it do?” You might ask…

I’m sure you recognize the /* Comment */ delimiters and the “End of File” and “Location” text – the magic is what’s between the backticks ` `

snipMate has this cool feature that allows you to echo the results of VIM functions (enclosed in ` `) as snippets.

1. expand("%")

   this function spits out the current file name.  You can also achieve this in insert mode with

   <c -R>=expand("%")<cr>

2. substitute(expand("%:p"),"/home/jon/public_html/[a-zA-Z]*/",'.\/','g')

   This is similar to the

   s//

   ex command – except it acts on an input string rather than the buffer.  I’ll break it down:

   1. substitute("input string","pattern to match","subtitute for pattern","modifier")

      takes the input, finds the pattern, replaces it with the substitue.  The ‘g’ modifier means to globally replace all pattern matches:

      substitute("/home/jon/folder","jon","blog","g") -> "/home/blog/folder"

      In this particular case, I’m replacing any instance of “/home/jon/public_html/<any number of alpha characters>/” with a forward slash “/” to produce the path in the code igniter file.

   2. expand("%:p")

      gives the full path of the file in the current buffer

The end result?
If my file is: /home/jon/public_html/foo/application/controllers/welcome.php
I can type

in insert mode and voila!

MUST faster AND easier than manually typing in all that stuff.  I can even shorten the snippet trigger – but I just prefer the more descriptive text.

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