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When using the delightful netrw support in vim to open a file, opening directly works well, as in

:e scp://hostname//path/to/file

however, you can't change the working directory via

:cd scp://hostname//path/

Is there a way of getting this or equivalent behavior? Key part is I want to be able to use a relative path to edit files.

Please feel free to use scripts or plugins in your answer.

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what's up with the closes? I thought we'd well established that only us programmers use vim. this question may very well involve scripting in its answer too! – Peter Aug 27 '11 at 17:06
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don't worry, from time to time people vote to close on Vim questions. If closed, we'll reopen it. And for reference, here is the link to the Vim discussion on meta. – sidyll Aug 27 '11 at 17:11
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Aug 28 '11 at 10:00

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1 Answer

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The concept of current directory is a property of a process. Since your vim process and the process at the other end of the scp are different, there is no way to effect its notion of the current directory. That said,

  • scp likely starts with a current working directory of the user's home directory. Things like scp user@host:txt/foo.txt . usually do the right thing.
  • Set a vim or environment variable to scp://hostname//path/ and then use :e $var/file. Details how to do this left as an exercise :-)
  • Folks on usenet newsgroups like comp.editors know all about vim.
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