how to make buffer bar longer, show the names of more buffers

Question

Currently my buffer bar (I don't know if this is the right word) looks like this:

Even though my terminal is super wide, it displays the names of only 4 buffers I have open and then an ellipsis (...) indicating I have more.

However, I would like it to fill up almost the entire width of the page with buffers, until it actually can't fit anymore and then use the ellipsis.

I use vim-airline.

Answer 1

Since you only posted a part of the whole picture, this all is just my guess.

I think that "buffer bar" is :h tabline. They display the current buffer in the corresponding tabs. I guess there are only 4 :h tabpages in that current session and thus only 4 filenames showing.

To give you a solution, I would say not to use tabline as tabs in other general text editors. The tabpage in vim is supposed to work like separating sessions.

Let's examine some terminologies:

• 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.

So, the usage of tabpage is twofolds:

• Managing splits
  Assume, you have set up a beautiful set of splits which you don't want to lose. Now what do you do if you want to look at a buffer with full window height and width? You could do :h CTRL-W_bar and :h CTRL-W__ but that would mess up your current splits. So, instead you should open a new tabpage and view that buffer with full height and width, and when you're done you can get back to your previous tabpage where your previously setup splits are left untouched.

• Managing projects
  Assume, you have a project in ~/projects/project_1 and you open vim in there. Your current working directory in the current session is ~/projects/project_1. Now, if you have to check on a separate project, you could open up another terminal and use a separate vim instance to work in that project. But if project_1 is dependent on project_2 or vice versa, and you need to work on both projects in the same vim instance, because of :h ins-completion etc. you can open a separate tabpages dedicated to each projects and change the current working directory corresponding to that tabpage with :h lcd. Now, you have two separate working projects with separate working directories but in the same vim instance.

Bottom line, :h tabpage is not supposed to be used for showing available buffers. You have :h :ls for that.