Using Vim s tabs like buffers

Question

I have looked at the ability to use tabs in Vim  with  tabe   tabnew  etc   as a replacement for my current practice of having many files open in the same window in hidden buffers   I would like every distinct file that I have open to always be in its own tab  However  there are some things that get in the way of this  How do I fix these    When commands like gf and    jump to a location in another file  the file opens in a new buffer in the current tab  Is there a way to have all of these sorts of commands open the file in a new tab  or switch to the existing tab with the file if it is already open  When switching buffers I can use  b  lt part of filename gt  lt tab gt  and it will complete the names of files in existing buffers   lt part of filename gt  can even be the middle of a filename instead of the beginning  Is there an equivalent for switching tabs

User · Answer

Vim  help window explains the confusion  tabs vs buffers  pretty well      A buffer is the in-memory text of a file     A window is a viewport    on a buffer    A tab page is a collection of windows    Opening multiple files is achieved in vim with buffers  In other editors  e g  notepad    this is done with tabs  so the name tab in vim maybe misleading    Windows are for the purpose of splitting the workspace and displaying multiple files  buffers  together on one screen  In other editors this could be achieved by opening multiple GUI windows and rearranging them on the desktop    Finally in this analogy vim s tab pages would correspond to multiple desktops  that is different rearrangements of windows   As vim help  tab-page explains a tab page can be used  when one wants to temporarily edit a file  but does not want to change anything in the current layout of windows and buffers  In such a case another tab page can be used just for the purpose of editing that particular file   Of course you have to remember that displaying the same file in many tab pages or windows would result in displaying the same working copy  buffer

User · Answer

Bit late to the party here but surprised I didn t see the following in this list    tab sball - this opens a new tab for each open buffer    help switchbuf - this controls buffer switching behaviour  try  set switchbuf usetab newtab  This should mean switching to the existing tab if the buffer is open  or creating a new one if not

User · Answer

Contrary to some of the other answers here  I say that you can use tabs however you want   vim was designed to be versatile and customizable  rather than forcing you to work according to predefined parameters   We all know how us programmers love to impose our  ethics  on everyone else  so this achievement is certainly a primary feature    lt C-w gt gf is the tab equivalent of buffers  gf command    lt C-PageUp gt  and  lt C-PageDown gt  will switch between tabs    In Byobu  these two commands never work for me  but they work outside of Byobu tmux   Alternatives are gt and gT     lt C-w gt T will move the current window to a new tab page   If you d prefer that vim use an existing tab if possible  rather than creating a duplicate tab  add  set switchbuf usetab to your  vimrc file   You can add newtab to the list   set switchbuf usetab newtab  to force QuickFix commands that display compile errors to open in separate tabs   I prefer split instead  which opens the compile errors in a split window   If you have mouse support enabled with  set mouse a  you can interact with the tabs by clicking on them   There s also a   button by default that will create a new tab   For the documentation on tabs  type  help tab-page in normal mode    After you do that  you can practice moving a window to a tab using  lt C-w gt T    There s a long list of commands   Some of the window commands have to do with tabs  so you might want to look at that documentation as well via  help windows   Addition  2013-12-19  To open multiple files in vim with each file in a separate tab  use vim -p file1 file2       If you re like me and always forget to add -p  you can add it at the end  as vim follows the normal command line option parsing rules   Alternatively  you can add a bash alias mapping vim to vim -p

User · Answer

Looking at      help tabs it doesn t look like vim wants to work the way you do     Buffers are shared across tabs  so it doesn t seem possible to lock a given buffer to appear only on a certain tab   It s a good idea  though   You could probably get the effect you want by using a terminal that supports tabs  like multi-gnome-terminal  then running vim instances in each terminal tab   Not perfect  though

User · Answer

I use buffers like tabs  using the BufExplorer plugin and a few macros     CTRL b opens the buffer list map  lt C-b gt   lt esc gt  BufExplorer lt cr gt     gz in command mode closes the current buffer map gz  bdelete lt cr gt     g bB  in command mode switch to the next prev  buffer map gb  bnext lt cr gt  map gB  bprev lt cr gt    With BufExplorer you don t have a tab bar at the top  but on the other hand it saves space on your screen  plus you can have an infinite number of files buffers open and the buffer list is searchable

User · Answer

This is an answer for those not familiar with Vim and coming from other text editors  in my case Sublime Text   I read through all these answers and it still wasn t clear  If you read through them enough things begin to make sense  but it took me hours of going back and forth between questions  The first thing is  as others have explained  Tab Pages  sound a lot like tabs  they act like tabs and look a lot like tabs in most other GUI editors  but they re not  I think it s an a bad mental model that was built on in Vim  which unfortunately clouds the extra power that you have within a tab page  The first description that I understood was from  crenate s answer is that they are the equivalent to multiple desktops  When seen in that regard you d only ever have a couple of desktops open but have lots of GUI windows open within each one  I would say they are similar to in other editors browsers   Tab groupings Sublime Text workspaces  i e  a list of the open files that you have in a project   When you see them like that you realise the power of them that you can easily group sets of files  buffers  together e g  your CSS files  your HTML files and your JS files in different tab pages  Which is actually pretty awesome  Other descriptions that I find confusing Viewport This makes no sense to me  A viewport which although it does have a defined dictionary term  I ve only heard referring to Vim windows in the  help window doc  Viewport is not a term I ve ever heard with regards to editors like Sublime Text  Visual Studio  Atom  Notepad    In fact I d never heard about it for Vim until I started to try using tab pages  If you view tab pages like multiple desktops  then referring to a desktop as a single window seems odd  Workspaces This possibly makes more sense  the dictionary definition is   A memory storage facility for temporary use   So it s like a place where you store a group of buffers  I didn t initially sound like Sublime Text s concept of a workspace which is a list of all the files that you have open in your project   the sublime-workspace file  which contains user specific data  such as the open files and the modifications to each   However thinking about it more  this does actually agree  If you regard a Vim tab page like a Sublime Text project  then it would seem odd to have just one file open in each project and keep switching between projects  Hence why using a tab page to have open only one file is odd  Collection of windows The  help window refers to tab pages this way  Plus numerous other answers use the same concept  However until you get your head around what a vim window is  then that s not much use  like building a castle on sand  As I referred to above  a vim window is the same as a viewport and quiet excellently explained in this linux com article   A really useful feature in Vim is the ability to split the viewable area between one or more files  or just to split the window to view two bits of the same file more easily  The Vim documentation refers to this as a viewport or window  interchangeably  You may already be familiar with this feature if you ve ever used Vim s help feature by using  help topic or pressing the F1 key  When you enter help  Vim splits the viewport and opens the help documentation in the top viewport  leaving your document open in the bottom viewport   I find it odd that a tab page is referred to as a collection of windows instead of a collection of buffers  But I guess you can have two separate tab pages open each with multiple windows all pointing at the same buffer  at least that s what I understand so far

User · Answer

I ran into the same problem  I wanted tabs to work like buffers and I never quite manage to get them to  The solution that I finally settled on was to make buffers behave like tabs    Check out the plugin called Mini Buffer Explorer  once installed and configured  you ll be able to work with buffers virtaully the same way as tabs without losing any functionality

User · Answer

Stop  stop  stop   This is not how Vim s tabs are designed to be used  In fact  they re misnamed  A better name would be  viewport  or  layout   because that s what a tab is mdash it s a different layout of windows of all of your existing buffers   Trying to beat Vim into 1 tab    1 buffer is an exercise in futility  Vim doesn t know or care and it will not respect it on all commands mdash in particular  anything that uses the quickfix buffer   make   grep  and  helpgrep are the ones that spring to mind  will happily ignore tabs and there s nothing you can do to stop that   Instead       set hidden If you don t have this set already  then do so  It makes vim work like every other multiple-file editor on the planet  You can have edited buffers that aren t visible in a window somewhere  Use  bn   bp   b     b name  and ctrl-6 to switch between buffers  I like ctrl-6 myself  alone it switches to the previously used buffer  or  ctrl-6 switches to buffer number     Use  ls to list buffers  or a plugin like MiniBufExpl or BufExplorer

User · Answer

If you want buffers to work like tabs  check out the tabline plugin   That uses a single window  and adds a line on the top to simulate the tabs  just showing the list of buffers    This came out a long time ago when tabs were only supported in GVim but not in the command line vim    Since it is only operating with buffers  everything integrates well with the rest of vim

User · Answer

You can map commands that normally manipulate buffers to manipulate tabs  as I ve done with gf in my  vimrc   map gf  tabe  lt cfile gt  lt CR gt    I m sure you can do the same with    I don t think vim supports this for tabs  yet   I use gt and gT to move to the next and previous tabs  respectively  You can also use Ngt  where N is the tab number  One peeve I have is that  by default  the tab number is not displayed in the tab line  To fix this  I put a couple functions at the end of my  vimrc file  I didn t paste here because it s long and didn t format correctly

[vim] Using Vim's tabs like buffers

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