A nicer way to "set path"?

[ashwinvis]

NOTE: nothing urgent

While set path=** is great, but it can be a pain if you set it globally. It tries to look for all the files and can freeze vim. For example, in the directory /home/user:

:find<Tab>

What I do now is have a per-project /home/user/path/to/project/.vimrc which is automatically sourced by having the following in the ~/.vimrc:

if getcwd() =~# '^\(/home/user/path/to/project/\)'
  set secure exrc  "execute project / directory specific .vimrc
endif

It is risky to have exrc activated globally as it may execute arbitary scripts.

An alternative would be to:

set wildignore= ...

Although I have not yet found a good example. It requires some regex-fu to set it nicely, doesn't it?