Just Keep Vimming In Tabs

Lately, I've been using vim more frequently. Here are a few useful tricks that I've picked up.

So the feature for viewing multiple files in tabs has been around for a while, but I only just discovered it. You can open up multiple files in tabs with

vim -p file1 file2 .. fileN

You can go to the next or previous tab with :tabn or :tabp. And you can edit a new tab with :tabe file_name. Close all but the current tab with :tabo. Annoyingly, I haven't found a single command that just quits and closes all the tabs, but :tabo followed by :q will get you there.

Also, since I use a black background for my terminal, the default font color for the selected tab name wasn't visible. You can change this color with the following command:

hi TabLineSel ctermfg=white

Also I wanted to remap the gt command used to toggle between commands to the Ctrl-T keystroke which is closer to what I use for tabs in Firefox. This can be accomplished through

map ^T gt

but it is tricky typing in Ctrl-T because it's mapped to something else. You need to type Ctrl-V first (right before typing Ctrl-T) to make this work.

You can put all these commands in your .vimrc file so that they get loaded every time you edit a file.

--Arkajit