I'm making tentative steps into using tabs in Vim. It seems a bit ridiculous, I've been using tabs in everything for the last 18 years:

• Visual Studio
• Every browser since Opera came up with them
• Notepad++
• Sublime Text
• Bash terminals

As you can see it's mostly Windows, but I really want to switch to proper free and open tools for my dev work, so I want to switch off Sublime Text into Vim.

I've also been a fairly basic user of Vim for 18 years. I only just realised that Vim does have tabs in it! Don't I feel clever...

So ok, great so Vim has tabs, but really they're not tabs, but they are, but they're not.

The Vim wiki on tab 'pages' has a mildly helpful start:

In Vim, each file is loaded into a buffer, which can be displayed in any number of windows, in any number of tabs.

I can just about get that, they're really flexible, which I can imagine is great. You could split a single file across tabs I'd imagine, I've never felt the need to do that, but I'm sure there's a use case for it.

But then the wiki falls off the edge of my knowledge whilst at the same time trying to claim they're making it easier for me:

The easiest way to think about tab pages in Vim is to consider them to be viewports, layouts, or workspaces.

My question:

Ok... so as it's so easy could someone explain to me what the following are in terms of Vim:

• viewport
• layout
• workspace

P.S. I've been found a helpful answer on this SO question on Using Vim's tabs like buffersUsing Vim's tabs like buffers:

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.

But again that doesn't explain what a viewport is, or a layout or a workspace. None of which I've heard of in terms of an editor before. (Well actually Sublime Text has workspaces but I'm sure they mean something different there)

Yes, I could keep googling down the rabbit hole, but I didn't expect the rabbit hole to be this deep.