CtrlP should never index particular directories

Question

My projects are in:

/home/user/projectA
/home/user/projectB

However, at times I hit CtrlP and I haven't opened a file in a particular project, so my working directory is /home/user. CtrlP starts indexing this whole directory, which is huge and takes a whole lot of time every time I accidentally hit CtrlP. How can I avoid this? I have seen that I can exclude files and directories using Vim's wildignore and CtrlP's own g:ctrlp_custom_ignore, but that doesn't work as I can't ignore a parent directory and still search in a child directory. Any ideas?

Alternatively, I would also be happy with Vim automatically making /home/user/projectA the default working directory, just to avoid ever having /home/user as the working directory.

Answer 1

2 ways of doing that:

• On your terminal, move to your project directory then execute vim.
• Manually specify the working directory into vim using :cd command (You can check the current working directory with :pwd).

Extra

CtrlP

If you're using ag with ctrlp, you can create a .agignore file into your working directory, and specify there what ctrlp should ignore and not index.

A little but useful vim command

In my vimrc I have the following command:

command! Dir :cd %:p:h

So with Dir I can set the current vim working directory to the current file's path, its useful sometimes.

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EDIT:

You can use vim autocommands (h autocmd) to automate the process.

Example if you want to make /path/project be your cwd in each vim start, add then to your vimrc:

autocmd VimEnter * :cd /path/project

The event VimEnter is quite understandable (h autocmd-events).