How to make netrw ignore new local files?

Question

I've set up an autocmd to automatically create directories of the filepath I'm writing to: au BufWritePre,FileWritePre * call <SID>EnsureDir(expand('<afile>:p:h')). This prevents creating directories when I discard the buffer.

I'd like to continue to be able to use stdin, provide url filepaths, and read files into buffers from within vim as normal. But how can I use netrw's features yet prevent it's FileExplorer autocmd (on VimEnter) to act on new/nonexistent, local files? What's a good approach to this?

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^{I hope it's clear what i'm asking. I'm suprised that I could not find a similar question. I read pi_netrw.txt, but could not find a method there. I use neovim version 0.2.2 on linux 4.14.3-1-ARCH.}

Answer 1

When testing, I could not disable plugins. I forgot about a file in /usr/local/share/nvim/site/... It turns out that I silently ran a bwipeout and edit when incorrectly handling <amatch> on a BufNewFile autocmd. I simplified my knotty setup and included a simple isdirectory() check.

netrwPlugin.vim behaves as expected (at least for my usage). sorry.