Vim Trick: Open current line on GitHub

Update: The fugitive vim plugin supports the same feature via :Gbrowse - thanks to @CrypticSwarm for the tip!

In my never-ending quest to automate my work flow, I recently came up with a neat little vim trick I’d like to share.

One of the things I do quite frequently, is pasting links to GitHub files/lines in email and chat conversations, e.g. Protocol.js#L144. So far my workflow for this has been to navigate to the GitHub repo, hit “t” to select the file, click on the line I want, and then copy the address bar location into my clipboard.

After doing this several times in a row the other day, I decided to automate it. The first piece of the puzzle was to create a git alias for determining the GitHub URL of the current repository to put into my ~/.gitconfig file:

[alias]
	url =! bash -c 'git config --get remote.origin.url | sed -E "s/.+:\\(.+\\)\\.git$/https:\\\\/\\\\/github\\\\.com\\\\/\\\\1/g"'

This allows me to easily get the URL of the current repository I am in, e.g.:

$ git url
https://github.com/felixge/node-mysql

Now I can do cool things like quickly opening this URL in my browser:

$ git url | xargs open
# or
$ open `git url`

But that still requires me to manually navigate to the file / line I am currently interested in, and I’m lazy. So I came up with this key binding for my ~/.vimrc:

nnoremap <leader>o :!echo `git url`/blob/`git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD`/%\#L<C-R>=line('.')<CR> \| xargs open<CR><CR>

Now I can simply press “,o” ("," is my leader key), and my browser will automatically navigate to the file/line underneath my cursor.

Feel free to adopt this for your editor / environment and let me know if you make any improvements. For example, one thing I didn’t get around to yet is opening visual selections as line ranges.