I've been using vim (and now neovim (fr)) for more than 15 years and I still discover new tricks regularly. This post is about one of those about vim's gf command. This command allows the user to open the file whose path is under the cursor. I guess it's clear how this can be handy to explore the source code of any application where the source contains references to others files.

These days I'm working on an application built with the popular stack composed of React, Redux, Babel and Webpack (and 2876 more friends ;-)) where quite obviously import is used to load dependencies of a given module. For those who don't know the import statement yet, as usual MDN provides a nice documentation about it. So the application source code contains code like:

import whatever from 'path/to/dependency' ; import relative from './relative/path/to/dependency' ;

Depending, on your stack and in my case depending on Webpack configuration, import path resolution can be quite complicated. In my case, the first one could mean:

path/to/dependency.js

path/to/dependency.jsx

src/path/to/dependency.js

src/path/to/dependency.jsx

node_modules/path/to/dependency.jsx

node_modules/path/to/dependency.js

While the second one potentially means:

src/common/relative/path/to/dependency.js

src/common/relative/path/to/dependency.jsx

The path can also reference a CSS file ( path/to/file.css ) or a SVG file ( path/to/file.svg ) with the same resolution directories or even a node module which means the main file of that module should be imported:

import stuff from 'a-node-module'

Initially, I thought I would need a plugin so that gf is able to resolve all those paths. I even tested some but they failed for me. After a deeper look at gf documentation, it turns out that 2 lines of configuration to set path and suffixesadd allows to almost solve the issue:

set path=.,src,node_nodules set suffixesadd=.js,.jsx

With that configuration, when hitting gf , neovim (or vim) will try to load the file in the given paths with the suffixes. The only case not fully solved by this is the one where the path refers to the main file of a node package, with the configuration above, neovim will open the directory node_modules/a-node-module which is already quite nice but for sure neovim can do better :)

This time includeexpr setting is the way out. It allows the developer to define a function to run if the editor was unable to find a file path. So by removing node_modules from the path and implementing a function, we can try to load the package.json file and build a file path with its main entry, this results in the following configuration:

set path=.,src set suffixesadd=.js,.jsx function ! LoadMainNodeModule (fname) let nodeModules = "./node_modules/" let packageJsonPath = nodeModules . a:fname . "/package.json" if filereadable (packageJsonPath) return nodeModules . a:fname . "/" . json_decode( join ( readfile (packageJsonPath))).main else return nodeModules . a:fname endif endfunction set includeexpr=LoadMainNodeModule( v:fname )

As far as I can tell, any imported module is now just a gf away from me. As a complementary tip, after using gf you can get back to the first file with Ctrl+O (as get Out) and get back again to the imported file with Ctrl+I (as get In).