Automatic file type detection with fully qualified ClearCase names

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created November 8, 2002 · complexity basic · author Arnaud Cassignol · version 6.0

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When using ClearCase for versioning, often you will view a specific version of a file like filename.c@@\main\branch\42. Vim cannot correctly identify the file type from this full name. To fix this, you can create an autocommand in the filetype.vim file in your user runtime directory.

augroup filetypedetect
 au BufNewFile,BufRead *@@/*
 \ if expand("<afile>") =~ '@@' |
 \ exe "doau filetypedetect BufRead " . expand("<afile>:s?@@.*$??") |
 \ endif
augroup END

The "doau" command is executed conditionally for compatibility with non-ClearCase paths that actually contain a '@@' sequence.

If you have any other autocmds set up for certain file extensions, you'll need to adjust them as well to account for ClearCase. If possible, using a FileType event can simplify things, since this is set automatically above. For example:

autocmd FileType c,cpp <command>

If you actually want to trigger off specific file extensions rather than file types, you'll need to add the pattern used above for detecting clearcase files. For example, to trigger only on .c files:

autocmd BufWinEnter *.c{@@/*,} <command>

References

• :help new-filetype

See also

script#15 combines well with this tip.

Comments

This used to work great, but when I upgraded my version of Vim, for some reason file detection stopped working. I did the following to fix it. I don't want to merge it yet, because I'm not entirely sure WHAT fixed it, so eventually I'm going to figure out what parts of my fix are not needed and merge only the necessary ones into the solution above. In the meantime, here's a fix:

augroup filetypedetect
  au BufNewFile,BufRead *
        \ if expand("<afile>:p") =~ '@@' && expand("<afile>:t") !~ '@@' |
        \   exe "doau filetypedetect BufRead " . substitute(expand("<afile>:p"),'@@.\{-\}$','','') |
        \ endif
augroup END

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