Disable ivy for find-file

Question

Is it possible to disable ivy-mode for file prompts?

In a past I used find-file to copy current file name or path to file.

dired-do-rename also is broken by Ivy: no default completion for current file + editing key binding extremely altered / navigation disabled...

Answer 1

Ivy-mode changes the value of completing-read-function. This function is used internally by read-file-name-default which is used for file name completion. The function used for file name completion can be changed using the variable read-file-name-function. By dynamically binding completing-read-function back to the default before calling read-file-name-default you will get what you want:

(setq read-file-name-function
  (lambda (&rest args)
    (let ((completing-read-function #'completing-read-default))
      (apply #'read-file-name-default args))))

Note that if you use counsel-mode, you have to undo the rebinding it does for find-file:

(define-key counsel-mode-map [remap find-file] nil)

Answer 2

Ivy supports multiple actions for the selected candidate. You can add your own actions, but by default there is a copy action that may be exactly what you need.

With the default key bindings, you can use M-o in the minibuffer to bring up the ivy action menu, and w to copy the currently selected candidate.

EDIT

I see this does not quite address your use case, since the current file name is not the default candidate for find-file when ivy is enabled. I always used to use find-alternate-file (C-x C-v) as a quick way to grab the current file name, and this works fine with ivy using M-o w as noted above. (Now I just have a separate key binding to copy buffer-file-name directly.)