Browsing a custom model in NERDTree

Question

I want to have a pretty browser for an svn repo for which I have only a sparse checkout (immediates). I have a file listing every file/folder, but they don't exist on my local drive.

What I'd love to do, is be able to browse the file listing hierarchically in NERDTree, then hook into the 'open' action to kick off some svn commands to checkout the relevant file, and then open it in vim.

Even if the second part isn't supported (hooks into NERDTree), even the first bit (browsing my custom model) would be great.

Is this currently supported by NERDTree, or anything else?

Answer 1

The directory enumeration in NERD_Tree currently is hard-coded to use globpath(); see this excerpt from plugin/nerdtree/tree_dir_node.vim:

function! s:TreeDirNode._initChildren(silent)
    [8 lines deleted]
    let filesStr = globpath(globDir, '*', 1) . "\n" . globpath(globDir, '.*', 1)

Fortunately, the implementation is (partly) object-oriented, so it may be possible to exchange the s:TreeDirNode object with your own SubversionTreeDirNode implementation. However, I don't think this has ever been attempted, and you probably need adaptations in NERD_Tree itself (e.g. hooks to inject your different objects).

I'd advise to contact the plugin's author with your proposition. As the plugin already supports extensions (for its menu etc.), the author is presumably open for additional hooks / config, maybe even willing to directly include any future Subversion-specific functionality.