Motivation

I created this plugin in the hopes of keeping my project configuration separate from my personal vim config. To understand why I went with this approach, we need to cover a bit of history of what vim offers.

In vim, set exrc (:help 'exrc') was the way to enable setting up extra configurations from a project directory. This detected a .exrc or a .vimrc in the project directory and vim would run that file as a normal vimscript file.

The problem this posed was that it didn't shield the user from the vimscript code that was executed in the file, this meant the .exrc file could contain malicious code and the user won't know about it.

So to circumvent this problem, you also had to add set secure (:help 'secure') along with set exrc in your vim config for it to extremely limit some parts of vimscript code. While that did solve a lot the problems brought by exrc its limit factor made it quite hard to perform the usual configuration for projects. For example, setting a filetype for a file to get syntax highlighting - especially for files that do not have built-in syntax support by vim - we will need to set it up with:

autocmd! BufRead,BufNewFile *.astro set filetype=astro

The above will not work if you have secure enabled, because according to the documentation on secure:

When on, ":autocmd", shell and write commands are not allowed in ".vimrc" and ".exrc" in the current directory and map commands are displayed.

Now with that (brief) history in mind. The reason why I created this plugin was to:

1. Due to the limitation of secure, I wanted to find a way to circumvent around that yet securely execute project config file.
2. Try out denops.vim to help write a vim plugin with Deno.

With that, I set out to write this plugin.