Updated on March 1st, 2022 in #vim

A Custom Vim Mapping to Copy a Buffer's File Path to Your Clipboard

Sometimes quickly copying a file's relative path is exactly what you need. Here's one way to do that.

Quick Jump: Demo Video

You can use this for a lot of things but my primary use case is around cross linking blog posts on this site which uses Jekyll (a static site generator).

Jekyll provides a {% post_url %} template tag where you pass in the relative file path of the post you want to link. Whenever I want to cross link a post I open the file, quickly hit this new cp mapping and paste it into the tag’s value with a minor amount of touching up.

Here’s the mapping: nmap cp :let @+ = expand("%")<CR>.

The video below goes into a bit more details on how it works and how I’m using it.

Demo Video

Timestamps

• 0:10 – Demonstrating 1 potential use case with Jekyll
• 1:33 – Going over the Vim mapping in my vimrc file

Reference Links

• The mapping in my vimrc file within my dotfiles repo

How do you quickly copy file paths in Vim? Let me know below.