In Part 1 we learnt about buffers and how to move between them and how to view all buffers as windows in VIM.
Here is a recap of the terms buffers, windows, and tabs.
- A buffer is the in-memory text of the file that was opened using vim. It may be visible or hidden. It is identified by a buffer number and has flags to indicate whether it is current, has been modified or not etc.
- A window is a viewport on a buffer whereas
- A tab is a collection of windows
Let’s look at a couple ways of dividing the screen to windows showing same of different files for editing in VIM.
vim -o file1 file2 file3 will open the 3 files in windows laid out horizontally. If you was the screen split into vertical windows then use vim -O file1 file2 file3
One could also use the command :new to open a blank window or :new file4 to open file4 in a new window that split the screen horizontally or :vnew file4 to split the current screen vertically
Go ahead and try it now. Play with the two ways of creating windows.
CTRL-W c to close the window where the cursor is positioned.
Moving to a different window is as simples as using CTRL-W arrow-keys
One can also convert all existing windows to tabs using CTRL-W T
Explore what happens when you start vim with multiple filenames as argument but no -o or -O switch. Check buffers using :ls and see if you can covert the buffers to windows and then to tabs.
To Run Forever 