The Short version

In your .vimrc set the following lines.

if filereadable(expand(printf('%s/%s', getcwd(), '.vimrc')))
  exec printf('source %s/%s', getcwd(), '.vimrc')
endif

The if filereadable will check if a .vimrc is available when booting vim. If not it will do nothing, but it won’t nag about it.

If a .vimrc is present it will load it. Now just create .vimrc in a location where you start vim and it loads up the configuration from that vimrc.

Why?

I have been spending a lot of time in various programming languages and development environments. I always try to use vim for everything that I need to do. For a couple of projects I’ve found that I need to do something different than what I use in all the other projects.

With the following additions the your (global) .vimrc you’ll be able to load local vimrc’s.

A project I’m working on is linting the code with rubocop. My default is standard. So in my (global) .virmc the linter for Ruby is defined as:

let g:ale_linters = {'ruby': ['standardrb']}
let g:ale_fixers = {'ruby': ['standardrb']}

In the projects folder the linter is defined as following:

let g:ale_linters = {'ruby': ['rubocop']}
let g:ale_fixers = {'ruby': ['rubocop']}

When starting vim within the projects root (where the .vimrc is located) it will override the linter and fixer settings for Ruby.

For example in ~/work/your-ruby-project create a .vimrc with the line echo "this is awesome". Now cd in your-ruby-project and start vim. It should echo the “this is awesome” 🚀