feature request: Support not using `oil://` scheme for local directories

[qstrahl]

Did you check existing requests?

• [X] I have searched the existing issues

Describe the feature

Provide the option to not use the oil:// scheme for buffers corresponding to local directories. For example, if I :edit ~/foo/, the buffer name would just be ~/foo/ rather than oil:///home/qstrahl/foo/.

Provide background

With other similar plugins that don't add a custom scheme to directory paths, I can rely on the buffer name to correspond to the directory on disk. This allows for incidental seamless integration with other vim features, plugins, and command line tools.

For example, if the buffer name for oil:///home/qstrahl/foo/ was instead ~/foo/, I could do things like :grep sometext % or :Gedit % or :!git log -- % and it would all just work. Unfortunately, no other tools that I'm aware of know how to handle the oil:// scheme, so until support for it spreads to the likes of grep and vim-fugitive, this seems like the best way to ensure oil buffers are interoperable within the vim/commandline ecosystem.

If there's some way to accomplish this already, I haven't been able to find it.

What is the significance of this feature?

strongly desired

Additional details

No response

[stevearc]

Unfortunately this is probably not going to happen, and definitely not anytime soon. We need to still support the oil:// scheme because some people use oil in conjunction with other plugins (such as nvim-tree) that expect to own directory-named buffers. Since going with this design, it's been extremely helpful to be able to assume that all oil buffers start with a scheme. That assumption is now spread all throughout the code, and will be very difficult to track down and change all of them.

As a workaround, you can create a cabbr that makes it easier to run these sorts of commands in an oil buffer

vim.cmd.cabbr({ args = { "<expr>", "%", "&filetype == 'oil' ? bufname('%')[6:] : '%'" } })

You can also check out :help actions.open_cmdline and :help actions.open_cmdline_dir to create keymaps to quickly run a command on the current dir or file

[LunarLambda]

I would also like to have this. I understand it's difficult however.

From a visual standpoint, there's options using a buffer-local winbar/statusline (similar to :h terminal-status). Grepping could perhaps be helped with something like telescope.nvim and custom maps, unsure about git.

Roughly speaking, what all would be required to make this happen? On the concern of compatibility with things like nvim-tree, could it be made a opt-in config feature, for users that only use oil (assuming the underlying architecture could handle both approaches with minimal redundancy)

If you can give guidance on what would need to be done, I would consider looking into implementing it.

Miscellaneous ideas:

1. tracking buffers by buffer number (hard to track consistently because user can do :bdelete/etc?)
2. tracking buffers with buffer variables (vim.b) or custom buftype (:h special-buffers mentions a directory type, but it's unclear how to create/detect such a buffer)

Though, since this kind of thing happens pretty often, maybe Neovim should grow a kind of 'logical buffer name' feature, which is used in buffer listings and things like % expansions, but not for things like autocmds. That would benefit a lot of plugins.