How can you use vim suffixes for NERDTreeIgnore?

Question

Since I already define my "intermediary" files with set suffixes=.o,~,..., how can I reuse that to make NERDTree not show those files?

It seems anti-DRY to put them all again in a different variable.

Answer 1

You can copy your suffixes to the NERDTreeIgnore variable.

As suffixes holds plain strings that Vim matches at the end of file names and NERDTreeIgnore holds regular expressions matched against complete names, to match similar files you'd have to

• anchor the suffixes strings to the end of names by appending $, and
• escape all regex-specific characters.

For example:

let NERDTreeIgnore = []
for suffix in split(&suffixes, ',')
    let NERDTreeIgnore += [ escape(suffix, '.~') . '$' ]
endfor

Note: This only escapes . (dot) and ~ (tilde) as they seem to be the only relevant characters appearing in the default suffixes. Add more characters to escape()'s second argument if you use different suffixes or need a more general solution.