File navigation in Vim (my way)

I'm going to talk about a flow I've developed recently, for myself, for navigating files within Vim.

Note I say Vim in the post title but I use Neovim, I just felt like saying that, because it makes no real difference to this post's content.

Let's just start with saying that I use fzf for finding files in a fuzzy matching manner. This is incredibly convenient. You can of course use CtrlP or whatever you prefer, but I use fzf.

So that's one way I navigate them, another way that, in combination with the above, is actually quite powerful, is with netrw-like or netrw enhancing plugins.

Namely vim-vinegar and vim-dirvish.

Why do I use two conflicting-looking plugins?

I use Vinegar because Vinegar provides a map of - to open the current folder in netrw, or go up one folder if already in netrw. But netrw isn't Dirvish, don't worry, cause Dirvish hijacks netrw so when you open netrw, Dirvish opens instead.

Dirvish is what makes this setup cool for me, so if you haven't already, read its README file.

Anyway, I wanted to document that. I'll also share my related rc config stuff so that you and I can reproduce this behaviour easily:

Plug 'junegunn/fzf', { 'dir': '~/.fzf', 'do': './install --no-update-rc' }
Plug 'junegunn/fzf.vim'
Plug 'tpope/vim-vinegar'
Plug 'justinmk/vim-dirvish'

" Relative line numbers in a Dirvish buffer
autocmd! FileType dirvish setlocal relativenumber

Update 2016-06-14

Somebody on Twitter actually let me know that you don't need vim-vinegar to have the usage of the - keybind, vim-dirvish added it to itself now, which is great.

So you can just have vim-dirvish installed now and that'll work out great. :)