Opening defx when running `:e /some/directory/`

Hi, apologies for not using your issue template! This is more of a question that I’m hoping for a quick answer to so that I can close this and file a more detailed issue if necessary.

I recently switched over to defx from vimfiler and I’m enjoying it, but I noticed that one feature of vimfiler appears to be missing in defx: the behavior where if you run :e /path/to/some/directory, vimfiler would open in that directory.

A variant of this is that if you ran vim /path/to/some/directory at the command-line, Vim would open and display vimfiler in that directory.

I’m not actually 100% sure that vimfiler provided this functionality, or if it was baked into Vim somehow that Vim would open a file explorer if you provide a directory as the argument to :e. Do you know where this behavior was coming from, and how I might be able to implement it with defx?

[daveyarwood]

I was able to re-implement this behavior as a straightforward autocmd:

function! s:defx_my_settings() abort
  " ... configure defx as per :help defx-examples ...
endfunction

function! s:open_defx_if_directory()
  " This throws an error if the buffer name contains unusual characters like
  " [[buffergator]]. Desired behavior in those scenarios is to consider the
  " buffer not to be a directory.
  try
    let l:full_path = expand(expand('%:p'))
  catch
    return
  endtry

  " If the path is a directory, delete the (useless) buffer and open defx for
  " that directory instead.
  if isdirectory(l:full_path)
    execute "Defx `expand('%:p')` | bd " . expand('%:r')
  endif
endfunction

augroup defx_config
  autocmd!
  autocmd FileType defx call s:defx_my_settings()

  " It seems like BufReadPost should work for this, but for some reason, I can't
  " get it to fire. BufEnter seems to be more reliable.
  autocmd BufEnter * call s:open_defx_if_directory()
augroup END

[Deerhound579]

When I do this, I will have a useless buffer with the directory name in addition to the defx window. For those who encounter this problem, this is my fix. It might not be the best way but works.

if isdirectory(l:full_path)
    execute "Defx `expand('%:p')` | bd " . expand('%:r') 
endif