How to create multiple files?

Question

While working on something like laravel, I end up creating the same view files index.blade.php, create.blade.php, show.blade.php within different folders like views/articles, views/comments, etc using the nerdTree mostly.

Is there a way to create the files from the command mode or through any plugin, for which i can create a key mapping to speed up things ?

Answer 1

You can create a bunch of filenamed buffers from within vim using :argadd:

:argadd dir1/index.blade.php dir2/create.blade.php foo/show.blade.php 

You can also use the syntax

:argadd dir/{foo,bar}.php

From there, you can switch between buffers using :next/:Next, :buffer or any other way.

Note: vim does not default write the empty buffers to disk unless you explicitly :w them. You can easily create them all on disk using:

:argdo w

The plugin vim-projectionist is designed for this use case:

https://github.com/tpope/vim-projectionist

and the vim-laravel plugin already has support for vim-projectionist

https://github.com/noahfrederick/vim-laravel

Answer 2

You could do something like this:

command! -nargs=* MakeLaravelFiles call MakeLaravelFiles()
function! MakeLaravelFiles()
  !touch /path/to/first/file /path/to/second/file /path/to/third/file
endfunction

And then setup a keymapping to that function, aka

nnoremap <silent> <leader>ml :MakeLaravelFiles<CR>

(Note: this snippet creates blank files, but you can use any CLI command you prefer instead of touch)