Vim - Working With Multiple Things

Multiple files

Let us suppose you are editing a file and you want to open another file in same Vim session. In that case, you can use Vim’s edit command. Below table shows these commands

Sr.No	Command & Description
1	:e Load new file in buffer for editing
2	:edit Same as :e
3	:e <tab> List the files for editing from current directory
4	:edit <tab> Same as :e <tab>

Multiple buffers

We have already seen what Vim buffers are. Vim supports multiple buffers. Below commands will be useful will working with buffers −

Sr.No	Command & Description
1	:badd <file> Add file into new buffer
2	:bN Switch to Nth buffer. For instance to switch to 3rd buffer use :b3
3	:bnext Move to the next buffer in buffer list
4	:bprevious Move to the previous buffer in buffer list
5	:buffers List all buffers
6	:bfirst Move to the first buffer
7	:blast Move to the last buffer
8	:ball Load all buffers

For instance, below command adds new file to buffer −

Now, there are two files in buffer. Execute below command to show this −

:buffers

It will show following output −

Multiple tabs

Like other editors we can also open multiple tabs in Vim. Below table describes tab related commands −

Sr.No	Command & Description
1	:tabnew Open new tab
2	:tabnew <file> Open new file in tab
3	:tabclose Close current tab
4	:tabnext Move to the next tab
5	:tabprevious Move to the previous tab
6	:tabfirst Move to the first tab
7	:tablast Move to the last tab

For instance, below images shows multiple tabs

Multiple windows

In Vim we can create new window using following commands −

Sr.No	Command & Description
1	:new <file> Open new window
2	:new <file> Open file in new window

In below image, we can see that current Vim window is split into 2 parts after executing following commands −

$vim message.txt
:new

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