How can I show the containing directory in the window title?

Question

I'm trying to customize my window title, which uses the same format as the statusline. I know I can show the full path to the file with %F (or %-0.20F to restrict it to 20 characters). I'd prefer to show the file name separately (i.e. with %t). In this case, is there a way to show the full path to the containing directory instead?

If I don't set titlestring at all, vim's window title seems to default to

file.txt (/full/path/to/containing/directory) - VIM3

I thought I might pillage the code for this, but set titlestring? doesn't show anything.

Answer 1

I'm not sure I fully understood what you mean so feel free to correct me in the comment if I didn't understood.

If what you are trying to do is simply show the directory containing your file in your title bar you can use:

set titlestring=%{expand(\"%:p:h\")}

With this configuration when I'm on the help file options.txt my title bar looks like this:

Note that the example I gave you uses expand and the filename modifiers thus you can customize it the way you want with the help of :h filename-modifiers