I would like to do this -
Open a file, say a.txt in vim. Then, do ctrl+z, which will take me back to the terminal, and hide vim in background. While I am in the terminal, now I would like to open b.txt in a new tab, right next to a.txt. Then, I could do fg to go back into vim, and have both a.txt and b.txt opened for me.
Any ideas how this can be done? When I open b.txt from the terminal, it launches vim in its own window.
3 Answers
When inside vim, I use
:tabnew filenameto open a file in a new tab.
From the terminal, you can do vim -p filename1 filename2 to open the two files in tabs.
I have added the following lines to my .vimrc that allow me to switch between tabs easily.
nnoremap <C-Left> :tabprevious<CR>
nnoremap <C-Right> :tabnext<CR>
nnoremap <C-j> :tabprevious<CR>
nnoremap <C-k> :tabnext<CR>C stands for the Ctrl key. Thus, I can do Ctrl-Right or Ctrl-k to switch to the next tab, and likewise for the previous.
This works for me.
For those using tmux - I have mapped Ctrl-h and Ctrl-l for switching windows in tmux. Thus, using the Ctrl key, and h,j,k,l, I am able to switch between all of tmux windows and vim tabs.
EDIT : I did not know this when I asked this question, but you really should avoid tabs to simply manage switching between multiple open files. Use buffers instead. Today, I have
nnoremap <C-j> :bprev<CR>
nnoremap <C-k> :bnext<CR>Just open the two files at the same time :
vim a.txt b.txtThen use :b# to switch between the tabs.
First, the command for suspending Vim is <C-z>, not <C-x>.
It doesn't work everywhere but it could be possible to do something like this to achieve your goal, if your Vim is compiled with the clientserver feature:
$ vim --remote-tab b.txtSee :help clientserver.
But…
You don't need to suspend Vim to open another file to edit. You can do that from Vim itself very easily:
:e filenameTab pages are not at all equivalent to other editors' tabs. Use buffers instead.
