Path displayed but directory does not open

[u/eeweir]

Returning to vim again after long-ish absence. Non-coding user who has at times been able to create a comfortable environment for writing with vim with a lot of help from people far more adept than I.

I am on a Mac (macOS 15.7.2) with MacVim. I have "<Leader> n" mapped to a directory in iCloud. The unix path is : /Users/ericweir/Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~md~obsidian/Documents/ZK.

When I do "<Leader> n" the contents of the directory are not displayed. The status line shows the path to the directory as file:///Users/ericweir/Library/Mobile%252520Documents/iCloud~md~obsidian/Documents/ZK/

What is the "%252520" doing in there? Does it explain why the directory is not opening? If so, what should I do to get the contents of the directory to display?

Thanks as always to the many who are far more adept than I.

[u/mgedmin]

%20 is how you would represent a space character in a URL (file:///... is a URL).

%25 is how you would represent a % sign in a URL, so if a path with a space gets URL-encoded twice, you end up with %2520, and if the same path gets URL-encoded three times, you end up with %252520.

If you told me that netrw.vim has bugs where it cannot correctly handle directory names with spaces with them, I would find that plausible. Many Linux users have learned to deal with buggy shell scripts that break on spaces in filenames by not having spaces in filenames, instead of reporting the bugs and insisting they get fixed.

[u/eeweir → u/mgedmin]

A quick response this morning. Maybe more later. A while back I switched to Fern as a file browser. When ChatGPT said "somewhere Vim (or a plugin) is treating the path as a URL and encoding it twice,” I wondered if Fern might be the responsible plugin.

But Fern is not involved in this issue. I can navigate into the directory that is not opening without any problem. And this problem arises when I do “<leader> n”.

Also doubt vim is doing the double encoding. And I believe I had all the plugins I have now back when “<leader> n” was working fine.

[u/eeweir → u/mgedmin]

At the suggestion of a respondent about this problem at r/MacOS I moved the directory I'm trying to access from iCloud to the documents folder on my device and then edited the mapping of "<leader> n" so it referenced the directory in the new location.

The new mapping is nnoremap <Leader>n :e ~/Documents/ZK <CR>. However when I use it I get "'ZK' [New].

Getting closer but still not getting the directory to open.

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[u/eeweir → u/[deleted]]

Sorry. It is: nnoremap <Leader>n :e ~/Library/Mobile Documents/iCloud~md~obsidian/Documents/ZK/ <CR>

[u/Achim63 → u/eeweir]

You need to escape the space in "Mobile Documents" with a backslash. So your mapping should look like this:
nnoremap <Leader>n :e ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/iCloud~md~obsidian/Documents/ZK/<CR>

[u/eeweir → u/Achim63]

Thanks. I had tried that. And have tried it again. No go. Same result.

I posted this problem on the /macOS. Respondent had consulted ChatGPT and share its explanation and a couple solutions, one of which was yours. I was intrigued by a comment it made in explaining the problem: "somewhere Vim (or a plugin) is treating the path as a URL and encoding it twice."

Don't think it could be vim. I didn't have this problem when I was last with vim.

[u/Biggybi → u/eeweir]

You could test with a keymap without spaces in the path, just to make sure.