Close particular buffer immediately upon leaving it

Question

I have a really large file with many paths in it. I don't want it to participate in any of the completion mechanisms. Is there a way to mark a particular buffer as "not a candidate for keyword completion" or, equivalently, to close it as soon as I leave the buffer?

Here's some motivation for doing it.

I have a file called ~/FILES that consists of two columns like this, with the name of a file in the left column and the full path on the right. It's just a manually generated index with a very simple format.

Here's an excerpt of the file showing part of the Linux kernel source.

ABCDBCDA.c                              ~/ws/opt/linux/tools/lib/lockdep/tests/ABCDBCDA.c
ABCDBDDA.c                              ~/ws/opt/linux/tools/lib/lockdep/tests/ABCDBDDA.c
ABI.txt                                 ~/ws/opt/linux/Documentation/devicetree/bindings/ABI.txt
ABI.txt                                 ~/ws/opt/linux/Documentation/mn10300/ABI.txt

This file is very long and really slows down keyword completion.

I've been using this binding to delete the buffer when following paths using gf, the most common way to exit the ~/FILES buffer.

nnoremap <silent> gf gf:silent! bdelete ~/FILES<cr>

but it's really modifying the behavior in the wrong place.

Is there a better way of marking the buffer?

Answer 1

If I understand what you're asking for, you could use autocmd to close ~/FILES when you leave this buffer.

autocmd BufLeave,BufWinLeave ~/FILES :bd ~/FILES

This way, everytime you "leave" this buffer (using :e or :n etc.) it will close ~/FILES.

Hope this helps.