Introduction

This will be a short article exploring the different ways you can open multiple files in vim at once, and the basic ways to interact with them, as tabs, windows.

The basic options are:

• tabs
• windows

Straight from the vim’s help page:

Summary:

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.

In the following examples I will be using the 2024 markdown files of this blog to illustrate how it works, how to move between buffers, tabs and windows, do note that in zsh **.md will expand automatically to all files in that folder with the full relative path, for example for a single file: priv/posts/2024/02-24-multinode-setup.md

How to open multiple files as buffers in vim?

> vim priv/posts/2024/**.md 

If we type :buffers then we can see the list of buffers opened in our vim instance, using :bnext and :bprev you can move between buffers, the symbols show which buffer is active, which one is hidden or inactive:

:buffers
1  h   "02-24-multinode-setup.md"     line 1
2  h   "02-25-upgrading-k3s-with-system-upgrade-controller.md" line 1
3  h   "03-16-getting-started-with-wallaby-integration-tests.md" line 1
4  h   "03-19-rss-is-not-dead-yet.md" line 1
5 #h   "04-14-remote-iex-session.md"  line 1
6 %a   "04-16-migrating-from-cronjobs-to-quantum-core.md" line 1
7  h   "04-16-running-cronjobs-in-kubernetes.md" line 1
8  h   "04-16-vim-open-multiple-files.md" line 1
Press ENTER or type command to continue

How to open multiple files as tabs in vim?

Similarly if we do vim -p, we will get all buffers opened as tabs, then you can list the tabs with :tabs, move between them with :tabn and back with :tabp, the main difference here is how the vim window treats a buffer on a single tab vs multiple tabs.

vim -p priv/posts/2024/**.md

Here you can see the list of tabs, for vim these tabs can hold multiple contents even split windows, that can’t happen in a single tab buffer kind of window for example.

:tabs
Tab page 1
    02-24-multinode-setup.md
Tab page 2
>   02-25-upgrading-k3s-with-system-upgrade-controller.md
Tab page 3
#   03-16-getting-started-with-wallaby-integration-tests.md
Tab page 4
    03-19-rss-is-not-dead-yet.md
Tab page 5
    04-14-remote-iex-session.md
Tab page 6
    04-16-migrating-from-cronjobs-to-quantum-core.md
Tab page 7
    04-16-running-cronjobs-in-kubernetes.md
Tab page 8
    04-16-vim-open-multiple-files.md
Press ENTER or type command to continue

How to open multiple files as windows in vim?

I guess the window is the tricky concept here, as a window can display a buffer, and multiple windows can be in a tab, so basically a window is the way we have to represent and see/interact interactively with a buffer.

so if we wanted to open all these files as windows we would have to do vim -o to open them horizontally split, vim -O for vertical split, if you ask me this is the feature I use the least, but it can be handy in some scenarios.

To move between windows you will need to use ctrl-w-<hjkl> depending on the position of the window that you want to jump or move to.

vim -o priv/posts/2024/**.md
vim -O priv/posts/2024/**.md

Bonus tip

Perform a search and replace in multiple buffers, vim is perfectly capable of doing some advanced replacements, here is an example of such task, when I was migrating to this blog I had a lot of content in github gists and wanted to make these just local code snippets, so I used the gist command-line helper and made almost all replacements automatic with just a command:

:%s/{{< gist kainlite \(53f54d81934666457a46cb667f8cea58\) >}}/\=printf('```elixir\n%s\n```', substitute(system('gist -r ' . submatch(1)), '\n', '\\n', 'g'))/

That’s an intimidating search and replace, basically what this does is searches for the pattern {{< gist kainlite \(capture_this_part\) >}} so we can extract the gist id first, then \= tells vim that we want to use the expression in the replacement, then with the help of printf we build our code snippet using the output of the command gist -r gist_id, then substitute is used to run the command and use the output as part of our replacement.

So for the sake of the example, the following gist:

{{< gist kainlite 53f54d81934666457a46cb667f8cea58 >}}

Would become the next snippet of code after running the previous command (this would be plain unformatted text):

```elixir
❯ kind create cluster
Creating cluster "kind" ...
 ✓ Ensuring node image (kindest/node:v1.21.1) 🖼
 ✓ Preparing nodes 📦
 ✓ Writing configuration 📜
 ✓ Starting control-plane 🕹️
 ✓ Installing CNI 🔌
 ✓ Installing StorageClass 💾
Set kubectl context to "kind-kind"
You can now use your cluster with:

kubectl cluster-info --context kind-kind

Have a question, bug, or feature request? Let us know! https://kind.sigs.k8s.io/#community 🙂
```

But what does any of that has to do with buffers and all that? well, you can apply that search and replace to all buffers using :bufdo, so our command would become:

:bufdo %s/{{< gist kainlite \(.*\) >}}/\=printf('```elixir\n%s\n```', substitute(system('gist -r ' . submatch(1)), '\n', '\\n', 'g'))/

And that will apply the search and replace command to all the opened buffers, also note the change in the capture group so we actually use the right gist id instead of the example one.

So, it was always a tab? yes! Any questions? Drop a comment 👇

Errata

If you spot any error or have any suggestion, please send me a message so it gets fixed.

Also, you can check the source code and changes in the sources here