Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 58

Jump to the Filename Under the Cursor

Vim treats filenames in our document as a kind of hyperlink. When configured properly, we can use the gf command to go to the filename under the cursor.

Let’s demonstrate with the jumps directory, from the source files distributed with this book. It contains the following directory tree:

practical_vim.rb
practical_vim/
  core.rb
  jumps.rb
  more.rb
  motions.rb

In the shell, we’ll start by changing to the jumps directory and then launching Vim. For this demonstration, I recommend using the -u NONE -N flags to ensure that Vim starts up without loading any plugins:

$ cd code/jumps
$ vim -u NONE -N practical_vim.rb

The practical_vim.rb file does nothing more than load the contents ...