Status line: Display path to file in the buffer, *without* filename

Question

I can use %t in my statusline to display the file name (tail) of the file in the buffer, but there's no corresponding option to display only the path, without the file name.

What I'm after: I'd like to display the path to the file in the buffer (as %f does), but I want the file name to stand out by giving it a different color. So if there were a corresponding %h (head) item I would just do:

set statusline=
set statusline+=%h           " Path to file (head)
set statusline+=%#Keyword#   " Switch color
set statusline+=%t           " File name (tail)

Does anyone know how can I achieve this?

Answer 1

Maybe you could use the following:

set statusline=
" Path to file (head)
set statusline+=%{expand('%:h')}/
" Switch color
set statusline+=%#Keyword#
" File name (tail)
set statusline+=%t

%{} allows you to evaluate an expression, which here is expand('%:h') (the head of the current file name).

Edit:

Your last comment says that you don't want to expand the tilda ~, and that you want the head of the path to use the highlight group of the statusline.

For the 1st problem, you could add the filename modifier :~ like this:

set statusline+=%{expand('%:~:h')}

For the 2nd problem, you could use the highlight group StatusLine:

set statusline+=%#StatusLine#

But it seems that it wouldn't give the desired background color.
So you could type :hi to get a list of all the highlight groups currently defined on your system, look for the one whose colors you're interested in and use its name to set up the colors of the head of the path.

It would give something like:

set statusline=
set statusline+=%#YourHighlightGroup#
set statusline+=%{expand('%:~:h')}/
set statusline+=%#Keyword#
set statusline+=%t