The vim-pathaction Vim plugin provides an interface for executing .pathaction.yaml rules directly from Vim through the pathaction cli, a flexible tool for running commands on files and directories.

Think of pathaction like a Makefile for any file or directory in the filesystem. It uses a .pathaction.yaml file to figure out which command to run, and you can even use Jinja2 templating to make those commands dynamic. You can also use tags to define multiple actions for the exact same file type, like setting up one tag to run a script, and another to debug it.

This tool is for software developers who manage multiple projects across diverse ecosystems and want to eliminate the cognitive load of switching between different build tools, environment configurations, and deployment methods. Just run one single command on any file and trust that it gets handled correctly.

If this package helps your workflow, please show your support by ⭐ starring pathaction.el on GitHub to help more software developers discover its benefits.

Below are two examples of key bindings (<leader>ee to execute the "main" tag and <leader>ei to execute the "install" tag):

nnoremap <leader>ee :call pathaction#run("main")<CR>
nnoremap <leader>ei :call pathaction#run("install")<CR>
nnoremap <leader>ed :call pathaction#run("debug")<CR>

By default, pathaction does not read rule-set files such as .pathaction.yaml from arbitrary directories. The target directory must be explicitly permitted.

For example, to allow Pathaction to load .pathaction.yaml rules from ~/projects and its subdirectories, run the following command:

pathaction --allow-dir ~/projects

Copyright (C) 2021-2026 James Cherti.

Distributed under terms of the MIT license.

mkdir -p ~/.vim/pack/jamescherti/start
cd ~/.vim/pack/jamescherti/start
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jamescherti/vim-pathaction
vim -u NONE -c "helptags vim-pathaction/doc" -c q

You can also install this Vim plugin with any third-party plugin manager such as Pathogen or Vundle.

• vim-pathaction, a Vim plugin that allows executing the pathaction command-line tool directly from Vim.
• The pathaction command-line tool (requirement): pathaction cli
• For Emacs users: pathaction.el, an Emacs package that allows executing the pathaction command-line tool directly from Emacs.