Practical Vim, 2nd Edition

Tip 118

Autocomplete Filenames

When we work at the command line, we can hit the <Tab> key to autocomplete paths for directories and files. With filename autocompletion, we can do the same from within Vim.

Filename autocompletion is triggered by the <C-x><C-f> command (see compl-filenameⓘ).

Vim always maintains a reference to the current working directory, just like the shell. We can find out what this is at any given time by running the :pwd command (print working directory), and we can change our working directory at any time using the :cd {path} command (change directory). It’s important to understand that Vim’s filename autocompletion always expands paths relative to the working directory, not relative to the file that is currently being ...