Once Again, MacVim Amazes Me
There were a few things that I had wished were different about MacVim - specifically, the filenames in the tabs had the complete path name, nicely abbreviated, but still, there. I asked the support group about that and they came back with the most incredible answers. Now it's true, I've been using vi/vim for about 23 years, and I'm by no means a wizard at Vim - I use it, and I'm quick with it, but there are a lot of things about it that I'm not aware of. Today was an education.
The Current Directory of the File
The first thing that struck me was that when you opened a new tab with the File Open dialog, you'd get the complete path to the file as part of the name in the GUI tab. Yes, the path was nicely abbreviated, but it was still there, and if I had tabs that I'd opened from the command line, they didn't have the path. When I read the answer it was obvious - the current working directory of the command-line tabs was well know - the ones from the file open dialog wasn't. So what to do? Well, the answer was to change the directory on those files as well.
The brilliant answer came from one of the contributors on the mailing list: have an auto-command change the directory for each buffer you enter. The lines in my .vimrc that controls this are:
if (has("gui_macvim"))
:autocmd BufEnter * :cd %:p:h
endif
The Format of the Tab's Filename
The second thing that can help is to force the tab to have just the filename and not the complete abbreviated path. This is done with a simple set command:
if (has("gui_macvim"))
:set guitablabel=%t
endif
With these two additions I have two things that I really didn't like fixed. When they get the ATSUI renderer working with the mouse support, this is going to be one incredible editor. It's pretty awesome already.