How can I permanently display the path of the current file in Vim?

Question

I know CTRLg displays the current file you\'re working on. Is there a way to modify my .vimrc such that the filename/path is always displa

Answer 1

The statusline is very powerful and handy I think. Strait out of the box it will display filename, cursor position and some flags. But you want to do the same as me and replace the filename-part with the full path to the file.

So while editing my .vimrc my statusline could look something like this as default:

.vimrc                                                        26,16           7%

You could view your setting of the statusline with:

:set statusline?

But if you have not made any alterations and no module has changed it it would be empty. But by the examples in the help-section (:help statusline) you could find that the default is:

:set statusline=%<%f\ %h%m%r%=%-14.(%l,%c%V%)\ %P

So include this in your .vimrc and change %f to %F. I also added added the filetype flag (%y) to my statusline since I find it convenient. So my resulting configuration looks like this:

:set statusline=%<%F\ %h%m%r%y%=%-14.(%l,%c%V%)\ %P

And the result would look something like this:

~/.vimrc [vim]                                                26,16           7%

Good reading:

• The documentation
• An excellent book to learn the basics
• There is lots here on stackoverflow!

PS. I run vim 7.3

Answer 2

I found 2 ways to display the file path in the Title bar of the gnome-terminal while editing a file with Vim.

The simpler (and better) way: Add the following line to your ~/.vimrc:

set title

Which will show you at the top:

filename.ext (~/path_to_directory_where_your_file_is/) - VIM

The more complicated way will show you the absolute file path. It's documented in a bit more detail in this blog post I recently wrote.